Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Trading Riffs to Slay Monsters: Poems

Trading Riffs to Slay Monsters: Poems

Komunyakaa, Yusef
McClung, Laren

Paperback

General Poetry

Publisher Price: $22.00

ISBN10: 0374617643
ISBN13: 9780374617646
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: Feb 17 2026
Pages: 240
Weight: 0.50
Height: 0.80 Width: 5.30 Depth: 8.20
Language: English

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.

Also from

Komunyakaa, Yusef

View All

Also in

General Poetry

View All