Description
The Horizon Never Forgets
poems by Steven T. Moore
ISBN: 978-1-963695-15-1 paperback $19.95
ISBN: 978-1-963695-16-8 ebook $9.99
March 18, 2025
James Baldwin, author and civil rights activist, stated that to be Black in America and relatively conscious is to be in a state of rage almost all of the time. In this audacious debut poetry collection, The Horizon Never Forgets, Steven Moore offers us drops of honey in the tender moments we sometimes experience, especially a mother’s love. But also, drops of fire and rage when he writes about being Black, when the world ignores the pain and refuses to address the ongoing struggle to live while bearing the weight of racism. Readers feel the rage, the burn, the fury of the Black experience, and the urgency for change—but also the uplift and hope that still reside within love’s possibilities.
Original cover art: End of the World by Emily Rankin
about the author
Steven Moore often says that his mother is the wellspring of his poetry. She read and recited poetry to him before his birth and through his growing-up years in locales as varied as Central America and Gurnee, Illinois. Moore received his B.A. in English from the University of Wisconsin-Parkside, and his M.A. and Ph.D. are from the University of Nebraska. The recipient of several teaching and scholarly awards, he is a university professor of English who often teaches poetry workshops and a class called Bon Appétit: Savoring Poetry & Good Cooking. While writing poetry, he immerses himself in jazz, the blues, and the spirit of Langston Hughes. Published widely in literary journals, he is also a bestselling children’s author and the author of two scholarly books examining Black rage.
Praise for The Horizon Never Forgets: Poems by Steven T. Moore
Timelines are usually drawn in unwavering straight lines—point A to point B, across the human seas of birth and life and death. But what artists do is create little circles along the way. Call them twisters, water spouts. Call them the chaos of life’s struggle in an unbalanced world. We poets, especially, sit on the back of the ship and sum up the storms humanity just sailed through, giving voice to all those feelings swirled up inside.
In this poetry collection, Steven T. Moore leads us down into this painful labyrinth, this deep circle of despair, to the heartbreaking things one human can do to another. But yet, just when all hope seems lost, Moore returns, poem after poem, to the image of his mother—that eternal vision of unconditional love.
This is not a political work. It is a humanitarian work that only a poet of Moore’s caliber could do—a coming of age in America’s timeline that leads up to a parent having to say goodbye to her child, having to leave a world she so desperately wished to make better for the next generation. This is the universal desire to open the heart—that boundless, colorless, greater good that beats within us all, as Moore so eloquently writes in the last poem of the book, “Goodnight”: “Now in this cold hospital room, / I look into her hailstormed eyes / and I think I know what she wants / as she points to a bookcase not there. / I recite poetry by Langston Hughes, / Jericho Brown, Maya Angelou / softly into her ear. She smiles, I weep. / She trembles, reaches over to wipe / away a few of my tears. / Stars rush into the room.”
—karla k. Morton, 2010 Texas State Poet Laureate and author of Turbulents & Fluids
The Russian poet Anna Akhmatova said, “You wish you could put back together what has been torn apart, but there is no such glue.” The pages of The Horizon Never Forgets are torn-apart pages, pages torn apart by love, hate, racism, and honesty. Steven T. Moore confronts us with a combination of hard realism and lyrical forgiveness. Into this poet’s world we are taken, and the only way out is to listen.
—Earl S. Braggs, author of Moving to Neptune, New & Selected and Obama’s Children
Steven Moore’s vision is clear, even as time and family and justice slip underneath him. In The Horizon Never Forgets, Moore writes for his mother and her “lifetime of fighting / for her sons to be free.” He writes for “her hailstormed eyes.” He writes her “a bookcase not there.” Moore’s poems search simultaneously for the “way out” of injustice and the way in. Here he is able to stay with pain—personal and systemic—and so allows his readers to do the same.
—Leah Naomi Green, author of The More Extravagant Feast and winner of the 2019 Walt Whitman Award
My ideal poem starts by tugging at my sleeve. Within just a few lines, the tugging becomes so persistent that I have to look more closely at what I previously ignored. By the end of the poem, my brief encounter leaves me staring with some kind of wonder or astonishment. Afterwards there remains much to think and feel in poetic aftershocks. This is the kind of quiet, plain-spoken, and devastating poetry Steven Moore delivers again and again in The Horizon Never Forgets.
—Albert Haley, author of Exotic and winner of the 2007 Rattle Poetry Prize
What does it mean to pull back the mask “that grins and lies”? To remove it completely, to bare the blackness of one’s grief, one’s rage, one’s pain on the page? To make your reader face it, feel it? To tell the stories of trauma on the margins of integration? To give voice to generational suffering? To have these stories resonate within the context of classic lines by Langston Hughes and Paul Laurence Dunbar? In The Horizon Never Forgets, Steven Moore drops us into the kaleidoscope trauma, the multifaceted fear of racist violence, the anxiety of caregiving for his aging parents, the devastating repeating cycle of loss and grief on the personal and national levels as one Black person after another succumbs to racist violence. This unflinching collection of poems reveals the complexity of Black male rage, giving us insight into debilitating horrors of negotiating medical, educational, cultural, interpersonal, and structural racism. They say that we must feel our trauma to heal it. Perhaps this powerful collection of narrative poems opens up space for the possibility of transcendence for all who empathize with the struggle.
—Cherise A. Pollard, author of Outsiders
At first glance, Steven Moore’s debut poetry collection, The Horizon Never Forgets, feels too hot to hold. The rage. The racism. The needless losses experienced daily by Black Americans in our society. But when you open your mind and heart to the indignities and injustices revealed in these pages, you see, really see, how looking the other way only further scars and berates our fellow humans simply going about their lives. Moore’s rage is bookended by childhood, where he learned to smile and nod in the face of bullying and caricature, to learning to live without his mother’s love and support. Still, Moore is lifted, despite the growing list of unarmed Blacks murdered by police and others, by the redemptive power of poetry, the remembered lines of Langston Hughes his mother recited to him as a boy. Let us not look away from the horizon ablaze with prejudice and fear. Let us name the names lost and not forget that we are all connected. Let us not stop hoping and working for change.
—Linda Parsons, author of Valediction: Poems and Prose
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