Poet Bobby Elliott explains that he has no interest in “fucking around on the page.” With a writer’s disdain of “obfuscation” and the 2025 University of Pittsburgh Press Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize-winning collection, The Same Man, in his back pocket, it’s clear that the genial Elliott means business. When asked about the lack of ornamentation in his writing (which leans on straightforward language and short stanzas), he points to “accessibility…and a genuine affinity for clarity.” There’s also a summoning of Adrienne Rich’s “dream of a common language’ that stems from feeling profoundly stymied by poetry that’s devoid of it.” In short, readers looking for either the postmodern or Poundian allusion won’t find it here. Instead, what’s to be had is the honesty of life lived bared through emotional complexity.
In her astute textbook on writing poetry, Naming the Unnameable, author and poetMichelle Bonczek Evory explains that “without emotional risk, a poem can lack tension, energy, and lose the chance of producing insight. If a speaker isn’t risking something in a poem, then why is it being written? It’s like getting into a car and driving nowhere.” That’s never the case in Elliott’s The Same Man, as the collection seems built on a kind of inward showdown between the speaker and his father, one that uses familial dysfunction as the filter of experience. Yet, even when the father isn’t on the page, he looms like a presence needing to be accounted for, sucking up oxygen with his needs. Or as Elliott puts it, “the essential crisis of the book…is their relationship. The speaker has been made to feel responsible for sustaining, and keeping alive, the father figure—and is reckoning with the toll this has taken as he is entering fatherhood himself.” As example, consider the full text of “When I Am Not Thinking of My Father”:
And whether
he has a gun
to his head,I am thinking
of driving you home
from the hospital—stopping at a yellow,
refusing to turn
on a red,our three-month old
Baby on Board!
sticker finallycome true:
our newborn
beside youin the back seat,
manger of light
in the mirror.
It’s a poem, like many others here which arrive on the page unfussy and flush with brevity; the metaphors landing just right. The tautness of the father’s needs looming just outside the frame as if for a moment, we might catch a phantom glimpse of him beside the new mother basking in post-partum joy. It’s a juxtaposition of moment and mindset that inhabits the strangely delightful idiosyncrasies of Elliott’s subject matter.
From the introductory poem, “Mondegreen,” Elliott dares us not to rubberneck as he writes, “I mistake the sound of a recycling cart/ hitting the curb// for the latch of our gate/ and picture him instantly:// my father stumbling/ into the light of the backyard// to shoot himself.” Inciting lines like these prime the rest of the collection as the speaker assembles (without dissembling) impressionistic memories of family troubles, even as his immersion into recent fatherhood gets balanced against the scars left by his own father’s self-absorption. The poem’s jarring conclusion rests by emphasizing the title and “this sound// I mistake for my father/ going through with it: one// awful letter in his coat pocket/ to me, another// to my unborn son.”
The Same Man is the culmination of a long journey for Elliott who mentions “I had maybe 100-150 poems that didn’t make it …a ton of work that either wasn’t strong enough or just didn’t align with the shape of the whole.” To shine some light on the process for those unfamiliar, first book publication can be a push-and-pull of both never-ending revision and self-doubt which can lead to some deep soul searching for writers looking to make their literary mark. Elliott’s advice: “I’d encourage them to get to a place of belief first – weathering the inevitable rejections to come is a lot harder if you’re on the fence about what you’ve made.”
Rather than conveying the father as a kind of “persona,” Elliott clarifies these poems as being “autobiographical.” That’s not to say “my recollection of events or experiences lines up with how my family remembers things, of course; all it means is that The Same Man is a faithful representation of how I do. And I wrote it, in part, out of an urgent need to be heard.” If it sounds like a page taken from the creative nonfiction playbook where a focus on family can often be a grounding principle, then so be it. Beset by the real drama surrounding physical and mental health issues, as well as the continued evolution of the “confessional” mode, poetry and other forms of literary art has helped lead to a turn toward acceptance and understanding of those in need of help. As the author Stephanie Wrobel shares in a craft piece for Writer’s Digest, “no matter how much crazy you have them commit, their motivations should always come from a place of human truth…You don’t have to condone a character’s behavior, but you should empathize with their feelings.” Perhaps, writing has always been a means toward healing. Or as Elliott puts it himself: “I felt very supported – even seen – by the ways my loved ones have met these poems. And that’s saying something because they’re not easy and they don’t run from much. In fact, they’re pretty damn adamant about facing the music with unvarnished honesty.”
It’s also important to consider the risk of alienation when writing about friends and family, with both Elliott’s mother and father still alive. When pressed about this, Elliott is more diplomatic about it than one might figure toward a man who seems to have created more than a bit of consternation for a lifetime. “In terms of how my father feels about the book itself, I’m reluctant to speak for him. What I can say is that the book was both painful for him to read ahead of its publication – and very important for our relationship. It made possible conversations we’d never had, but, in my view, needed to have and – as of now – it’s brought us closer. He’s met it with grace and a desire to grapple with what it contains. Hard to ask for more than that.”
The title poem bears this out through inner narration set during a meal at a restaurant where the speaker will order a dessert, though “I’m too embarrassed// to maul the name/ of, pointing to it/ with a smile// our waiter almost/ forgives and agreeing/ when my father leans// into the candlelight/ to say We can/ tell each other anything, //can’t we?” The setting and jumpy line breaks add to the mood, a juxtaposition to the kind of forced smile we can imagine the speaker wearing before “the entrees come out/ like a reward// for reinvention.” Or as the lines afterwards share that “his life wouldn’t/ be worth living/ without us// which is another way/ of saying/ he’d kill himself// if not for the few/ hours each week he gets/ to play hide// and seek with my son.” The poem, taut and end-stopped if only by the need for the reader to breathe, concludes on an experience of mixed emotion where a memory of college lands with his younger self “trying to decipher/ what I was hearing/ over the phone—// the wind chimes/ on the back deck/ going wild, his two// untrained dogs/ barking, the chamber/ opening, the chamber// closing, something/ about why I had to be/ so far away.”
In the spring semester of 2024, teaching a capstone course, “Senior Seminar in Poetry,” which focused on developing poems into (maybe) published things, I was excited to invite Pitt Poetry Series co-editor Nancy Krygowski (with Jeffrey McDaniel), to discuss the landscape of publishing with students, some who would soon be matriculating toward MFA’s and beyond. Among the insights she brought that evening was a bit of the nomenclature employed by poetry editors, where a manuscript with a “basement” tread in focused, well-fleshed foundational themes, foregoing the scattershot approach that values clever word play over emotional depth. She may not have been discussing The Same Man, but in an email she recently disclosed “we never know what will strike final judges, but I remember thinking the manuscript was really strong.”
Krygowski continued by adding what’ll be apparent to readers: “I was impressed with both the micro (Bobby’s concise, exact language and use of line and stanza breaks demonstrates great skill) and the macro (the emotional project of the book, how he juxtaposes his relationship with his father to what it means to be a father to his kids). I am impressed with his ability to articulate the complexity of these relationships in such concise, direct, yet subtly musical language, in poems that never tip over into sentimentality or unexamined anger. The book reads like a study in smart compassion.”
That judge, poetNate Marshall, whose collection Wild Hundreds also won the Starrett Lynch Prize in 2014, obviously felt the same. Ellott shares that the “memorable” phone call informing him that his manuscript was chosen from among hundreds arrived just before he left to teach his high school classes that morning with Marshall’s voice on the other end of the line saying “Bobby, I hope your day’s been going well, but it’s about to get a whole lot better!”
It’s a writer’s dream-come-true moment, but also one that’s grounded by its genesis in both difficult life events (his parents’ divorce) and a caring English teacher who guided him at sixteen toward the Modernists. When asked about poetic influences, Elliott points to Langston Hughes “for his clarity” as well as Li-Young Lee “for his claiming of the familial, and the domestic space as one of meaning.” Some of Lee’s most anthologized poems like “The Gift,” Eating Together,” and “Eating Alone,” deal elegiacally in their description of fatherly interactions. Gerald Stern, Lee’s own mentor, characterized them as having “a certain humility, a kind of cunning, a love of plain speech…a willingness to let the sublime enter his field of concentration and take over.” The same could also be said of Elliott’s approach in The Same Man where fatherhood emerges as the cohesive melody to poems which succeed in both their relative restraint and reflective sincerity.
When asked about influences on his writing, it’s unsurprising the NYC-native and current Portland, OR-resident invokes Stern, a beloved Pittsburgh poet (and Lee’s University of Pittsburgh professor) before Elliott quotes Stern’s line from “The One Thing in Life,” where he writes of making “my own bed of straw.” It’s a poem which helps illustrate Elliott’s younger self embracing the long apprenticeship of writing poetry as his difficult family life made him “desperate for a sense of direction.” Besides teaching high school students to seek that own kind of devotion to whatever they pursue, his own journey began with a leap of faith: “If you feel a deep and abiding kinship with poetry, it’s probably a sign that you should trust it.”
In a collection as immersive as The Same Man, it’s useful to consider tone as the emotional regulator of poems as heavy as these. “Initiation,” finds the father teaching the son to “float face down/ in the pool/…to hold my breath/ and relax, limb to limb,/ until…/ my mother, looked/ up from their weight/ loss magazine/ in horror.” That the complicit father “looked like a leaf/ minding its own/ finished business” remains a testament to both the vulnerability Elliott employs by sharing these moments and the arm’s length readers are kept by the implications of their collusion, the father, left “beaming like we/ finally had something/ in common.” That “collusion” can be a powerful force in the connective ways fathers and sons bond, allowing reader’s to remember their own fathers who might’ve thought a prank like that to be funny.
And perhaps that’s the blessing Elliot allows by making peace with an upbringing that reads traumatic in its spare details, leaning on an even-keeled voice to underplay its cumulative effects. Thankfully, there’s a pivot to the more celebratory aspects of the speaker’s life. In “Sounds,” readers get a listing of favorites: “The onions on the stove/ and the tea kettle getting ready/ to go off/…ten pairs of sneakers like birds/ on the televised court.” But what turns the poem from an ode to a love poem is the introduction of the wife “walking naked/ on the hardwood floors/…me jealous/ of the floor itself, of the mirrors you pass/ and the clothes in a warm pile on the bed.” Appearances by the mother as well as his children elsewhere does much to balance the heavy emotional cost found throughout the collection though the father’s presence feels at times like overlapping elements among the circles of a Venn Diagram.
In that vein, The Same Man “gets to where/ it needs to go” when three generations come together for an awkward visit where the speaker kneels “by another basket// of warm clothes/ and fold them// like my mother/ folded ours, rehearsing// what she’d do/ when she was free.” It’s an anticipatory moment from the collection’s final poem, “Where We Land,” stated in Elliott’s matter-of-fact mode where the concision adds up into something both potent and visceral.
Unlike Sharon Olds in her impactful collection, The Father, Elliott, seldom employs direct characterization. At the same time, Elliott uses our interview to reflect that “In a lot of ways, how The Same Man has been received, both by those close to me and total strangers, has been heartening. It hasn’t necessarily emboldened me in the way of Sharon Olds’ infamous ‘Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it,’ but it’s signaled to me that readers are generally more accepting than we fear.” With plans for another book, he’s “trusting” the creative process to show the way, and an attempt at writing memoir looms “a little bit frightening,” but also “pretty fucking exciting, too,” before Elliott points to Lucille Clifton’s advice to writers: “the surest failure is the unattempted walk.”
