I mistake the sound of a recycling carthitting the curbfor the latch of our gateand picture him instantly:my father stumblinginto the light of the backyardto shoot himself.I’d been looking at the fruit treesand the fire pit,the loose board of the old fencein the wind.I’d been thinking of how lostyou’d have to beto believe you kneweverything there was to knowabout yourself.And now this soundI mistake for my fathergoing through with it: oneawful letter in his coat pocketto me, anotherto my unborn son.
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“Mondegreen” from The Same Man by Bobby Elliott, © 2025.
All rights are controlled by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA 15260.
Used by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.
Bobby Elliott is an award-winning poet and teacher. His debut collection of poems, The Same Man, was selected by Nate Marshall as the winner of the 2025 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize from the University of Pittsburgh Press and was a finalist for the 2026 Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. Raised in New York City, he earned his B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and his M.F.A. from the University of Virginia, where he was a Poe/Faulkner Fellow. The recipient of a Pushcart Prize, his writing has appeared in Adroit, BOMB, Poet Lore, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife and sons.
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
University of Pittsburgh
Winner of the 2025 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize
Finalist for the 2026 Norma Farber First Book 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.
"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."
—Edgar Kunz, author of Fixer
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