Trading Riffs to Slay Monsters
Poems
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected 17 Feb 2026
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- USD 12.99
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- Pre-Order
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- USD 12.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This singular poetic collaboration between Komunyakaa (Everyday Mojo Songs of the Earth) and McClung (Between Here and Monkey Mountain) chronicles their efforts to cope with the isolation and fear of the Covid-19 pandemic. Begun as an email exchange initiated by Komunyakaa in March 2020, the collection comprises epistolary tercets the poets traded nearly every day for the next two years and culminates in a dreamlike epic poem tracing time and geography. History, in these poems, functions as a fluid medium, allowing the poets to move with ease between the here-and-now and the ancient past, as in these lines from early in the collaboration: "We lament blame plaguing us/ as a fever sweeps over the seven/ continents. Does blood of bull/ or lamb bless the thresholds/ of every doorjamb, where no gold/ or crossbow can rescue us now?" The poets' exchanges are delineated by an indentation that gives the text polyvocal and contrapuntal qualities, further heightened by the array of figures—from Socrates to Toni Morrison—who enter the text. An underlying sense of unease pervades: "If we went back to digging up pig roots/ with bare hands, or buried our clocks/ in river beds, we're not innocent, no sir." Readers will find it a gripping and surreal vision of pandemic times.
