ONLY (SO FAR), poetry by Larry W. Moore

Publication Date: August 22, 2026

Paperback, 118 pages 

ISBN: 978-1-966677-54-3

(Only) So Far covers a journey of forty years through poetry. Steeped in narrative and expressing love, nature, politics, and engaging word play, Larry W. Moore reveals a rich life well lived.

Praise for Larry W. Moore & Only (So Far)

In the ramshackle house of poetry, no one has shouldered into more rooms than Larry Moore. Editor, entrepreneur, production manager, scholar, book-designer, advocate, and publisher… Larry Moore has created and sustained, in Broadstone Books, one of the most broadminded independent presses in the country. / Now, in Only (So Far), we have the source-code of this achievement. Representing forty years of poetic engagement, this book unveils a mind and heart attuned to a world that is intimate and unbounded…. Only (So Far) travels further than any mapped destination can name.

—from the Foreword by Philip Brady, author or The Elsewhere & others

Among Larry Moore’s gifts is the gift of remembering, and the gift of these poems isn’t only that they capture the resonance of seemingly ordinary things that too often go unnoticed but that they radiate a richness of connectedness through quiet celebrations of people, communities, and histories. These poems are, to borrow a detail from one of Moore’s memories, fireflies at dusk that bring us into the moment and beyond it as well.

—Tim Hunt, author of Then Back Again to Now & others

In Only (So Far) Larry Moore exhibits not just a distinguished editor/publisher’s but a true poet’s grasp of the complex rhythms of a volume of poetry of a sort that will take your breath away. While for two decades Moore has focused upon publishing as wide a range of distinguished poetry as any small press, it would be too much to say that as a poet himself he’s hidden his light under a basket.  Here a constellation of his poems first appearing in literary journals and anthologies over the years easily join a galactic stream of others whose nimble music and searing illumination evoke poets ranging from Gerard Manley Hopkins and William Carlos Williams to Moore’s erstwhile Kentucky compatriot Ada Limon. Only (So Far) makes it blazingly clear that he has not been hiding but rather nursing a veritable galaxy of poems that rival the largest and brightest stellar nurseries the Webb Telescope discloses. 

—Michael Joyce, author of Capricorn, Venus Descendant & others

Larry W. Moore’s Only (So Far) is a celebration of the places that resist cartography—the dusty heat of small-town America, boyhood lit by “orange-red glowing tips of my parents’ cigarettes,” swirls of gingham, pyramids of squash, and “eyes shining out of a ruined face.” Set to the “jerky glissando of ….Irish eyes…..” Moore offers a tour of that “fattened fable” America: dapper yet bristled, these poems are crowded with farmers, clergy, businessman, “bringing the sound of Verdi to the prairie.” They are “spilling into twilight sidewalks / stretching from Havana to Harlem.” They are ecstatic priestesses on a roadhouse dance floor, transforming to the music of “sweet green taste.” They are soft, fragrant poems that light up the world, sometimes as bolts and sometimes as firefly-size specks. There, Moore holds out the label of liberty for our inspection: freedom as a burgeoning, excitable, thing next to the old mythos that “some frontiers / are never closed.” In a masterful balance of humor and reality, Moore shows us that beneath the cracked soil is a bit of moisture, and that everyone is offered a seat on the porch, a pour of expensive gin, and a mirror to see the scratches of language “like all our history: / skeletal / and read backwards.” The poems of Only (So Far) are maps of this community property “made and remade / re-emerging in the utility and beauty of a quilt.”   

—Sara Cahill Marron, author of Reasons for Étant Donnés & others

About the Author

Larry W. Moore is a published poet, translator, literary scholar, and photographer. An honors graduate of Transylvania University (Lexington, Kentucky) with a double major in humanities and psychology, he spent a year in Germany researching the life and work of Hermann Hesse supported by a DAAD foreign study grant, followed by graduate study in history of science and medicine at the University of Kentucky. His critical study of poet Vachel Lindsay was published in Regionalism and the Humanities (University of Nebraska Press, 2003). He is previously the author of The River Remembers, a collection of narrative and persona poems based on the history and lore of his hometown, Frankfort, Kentucky, along with several poems published in journals. Retired from a long career in government where he served in management, training, and policy advisory positions, in 2002 he cofounded Broadstone Media LLC, a cultural promotion

company, and since 2003 has served as publisher of Broadstone Books, a national small press specializing in poetry. He also was for many years the curator of two art galleries.