Winner of the 2025 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize
A one-of-a-kind debut that asks what we owe those we love, The Same Man is an aching chronicle of the early days of parenthood and the wounds of the past. Haunted by memory and powered by the demands and joys of new life, Elliott’s poems wrestle with the father-son relationship at their core and the deep, unspoken harms that shape us. A relentless effort toward expression and autonomy, The Same Man is a reckoning and a balm, a rallying call and a father's song of devotion.
About the Author :
Bobby Elliott's writing has appeared in or is forthcoming from BOMB, The Cortland Review, ONLY POEMS, Poet Lore, Poetry Northwest, RHINO, and elsewhere Raised in New York City, he earned his BA from Sarah Lawrence College and his MFA from the University of Virginia, where he was a Poe/Faulkner Fellow. He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife and sons.
Review :
Bold yet subtle, spare yet utterly intense, Elliott demonstrates a sensitivity to the deeply painful, specific, and idiosyncratic nature of family dynamics.
Bobby Elliott’s The Same Man confronts the subject of fatherhood with an honesty and tenderness rarely accorded to the typical secondary parent. In these poems, we see a pair of imperfect men reach toward each other and, indeed, toward the work of both fathering and being fathered. These are the kinds of poems that truly ring of a journey toward healing and forgiveness—but not the saccharine healing we see in media that demands succinct, neat endings. These poems sing of real human healing, which is a messed-up and often incomplete process, but is perhaps the holiest one we can submit to in our lives. Elliott is a bard of the familial experience. These are poems to hold tight.
The Same Man is a tender meditation on love, memory, and the ghosts that shape us. Bobby Elliott masterfully recounts a father—a man as much feared as loved—whose presence lingers even in absence, shaping the future for a son and his sons who will go on without him. Drifting between past and present, reality and dream, Elliott weaves a liminal space where time folds in on itself, and heartache binds a raft from wreckage. How deep to go, how soon to breathe—these are the questions that reverberate through generations, in a story of reckoning and the hard-won spaces one man builds for another, touching every life that comes after.
Bobby Elliott’s The Same Man is a slim miracle, a book that transcends its classical subject—a son reckoning with his father, the son becoming a father himself—through what I can only call a kind of genius. Here is a poet of searing clarity and remarkable restraint, a poet who believes in plain language’s power to lay bare, to dignify, to transform. At once subtle and perceptive, tender and unsparing, Elliott shows himself to be an artist of rare sensitivity: He says only precisely enough to set the reader ringing like a bell. I lost count of the number of times I shook my head and mouthed wow. It’s hard to imagine a more mature and accomplished debut.
How to survive and then spin such daunting material into lyric narratives delicate as a silk thread, yet tensile and strong as a vibrating steel string bestowing a haunted, haunting music? How to map such landscapes of hope, despair, love, and risk? Somehow Bobby Elliott has done just that with rare grace in this lovely debut.
With poem after finely wrought poem, The Same Man renders anew that fraught and familiar father-and-son dynamic. What do we owe those who’ve hurt us most? Are we destined, no matter how hard we try, to repeat their mistakes?
The Same Man is a beautifully—and troublingly—introspective portrait of abusive family dynamics, a meditation on how forms of care sometimes calcify over into contempt. It is the best debut I’ve read in the past year.
