Trading Riffs to Slay Monsters: Poems

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 throug...