Farrar Straus Giroux, paperback
Publication Date: February 17, 2026
Publisher Marketing:
A witty and searching collaborative poetic work composed during the pandemic.
Let's go back far as we dare
to go back to that land bridge
made of untrusting earth & ice,
to a boorish faith in our rhythm
of footsteps, the fleeting mantra
of wordless dreams . . .
So begins Trading Riffs to Slay Monsters, the collaborative work of an elder statesman of American poetry and a young emerging poet. In early 2020, Yusef Komunyakaa and Laren McClung began a conversation in verse that carried them through the COVID pandemic. The result is a work that is at once a document of the poets' inner and outer worlds and also a single and singular vision of what it is to live now and to look back on the epic scale of human history and artistic expression that stretches over millennia.
