Advance Praise

“RUN IT BACK is a beautiful series of odes, steeped in rich and beautiful specificities, that show us, as Morrison demands, a "particularized world." Nothing that arrives to the eye remains what it is: not the part in the hair of Frederick Douglass, not the bowl of cereal or the Telfar bag. I love the richness within these poems, I love the world they give me access to.” -Hanif Abdurraqib, Author of A Fortune For Your Disaster and There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

“Kortney Morrow’s poetry transforms childhood icons into sharp-edged mirrors that reflect our struggles with identity and belonging. Morrow is like a cultural archaeologist, digging beneath the surface of childhood memories to unearth the complex histories they bear, creating dazzling lyric spaces where nostalgia and critique intersect. RUN IT BACK is an essential book on the profundity of pop culture’s touchstones in shaping identity.” -Carmen Giménez, author of BE RECORDER

“RUN IT BACK feels like the rejuvenation of an era, as Kortney Morrow plays through the object of experience and the experience of fraught objects: american girl dolls at diversity training, store bought serotonin, Call of Duty kills from the imperial homeland, and those times when “even bubbles bust a cap in the ceiling.” Daydreaming with RUN IT BACK I’m reminded of Sonia Sanchez’s Homegirls & Hand Grenades and invited, in the register of something like home, to recall Khadijah Queen’s I’m so Fine as we see what Kevin Durant can’t in the re-framing of a would be forgotten moment. In other words, Kortney Morrow is a real one, and we’d do well to watch her work.” - Joseph Earl Thomas, Author of Sink and God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer