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.

Yusef Komunyakaa’s books of poetry include Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth, The Emperor of Water Clocks, Testimony: A Tribute to Charlie Parker, The Chameleon Couch, Warhorses, Taboo, Talking Dirty to the Gods, and Neon Vernacular, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize. His plays, performance art, and librettos have been performed internationally and include Wakonda's Dream, Saturnalia, Testimony, and Gilgamesh: A Verse Play. He teaches at New York University.

Laren McClung is the author of a collection of poems, Between Here and Monkey Mountain, and the editor of Inheriting the War: Poetry and Prose by Descendants of Vietnam Veterans and Refugees. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Harvard Review, Poetry, The Yale Review, and many other journals and anthologies. She has held fellowships and residencies from Teachers and Writers Collaborative, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus in Schwandorf, Germany. She teaches writing at New York University.