Let’s go back far as we dareto go back to that land bridgemade of untrusting earth & ice,to a boorish faith in our rhythmof footsteps, the fleeting mantraof 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.