reviewed on January 7, 2026

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Rarely does a collection of poetry afford the kind of access to family psychology that one finds in Bobby Elliott’s impressive debut, The Same Man, selected by Nate Marshall for the top-tier Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize.  Keenly perceptive in its observation of emotional manipulation, the book centers on an ostensible change in behavior on the part of the speaker’s father, who, as he becomes a doddering and tender grandfather, nonetheless remains “the same man” who wielded threats of suicide and other extortions throughout the speaker’s childhood. 

 

In this way, The Same Man is a study in revision, as the try-hard grandfather endeavors—in teeming family-photograph walls, in a newly found affinity for hide-and-seek—to revise out of existence the abuse he once leveled at his children and wife.  Elliott identifies these deceptions, and shows too how even demonstrative, grandfatherly care can be a kind of weapon, and how past abuses become a form of—though I loathe the phrase—intergenerational trauma:

 

he finally says

what he’s always said—

 

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 […]

 

Just as his father attempts to revise their shared past, Elliott himself carries readers through the process of parsing and revising the ambiguous emotions he harbors toward his father. The Same Man is an expert and carefully paced working-through of these ambiguities, a sifting of inheritances in which the speaker comes to develop his own language about the past.  It is, in other words, a first-book künstlerroman, its speaker watching in awe and anticipation as “Vanna White glittered […] and a bank of consonants // and vowels waited / to be touched.”  This is the story of an artist and how he becomes one.

 

To be sure, these are first-book poems.  For all their emotional insight, they remain relatively staid in their formal ambitions, epiphanic “workshop lyrics” in the situational mode—one writes stories in MFA workshop, not novels.  This limitation is most conspicuous in a poem like “What We See Together,” a walking-poem, like the Romantic ramble, in which the speaker describes a walk with his son before coming home to “the woman / who brought you into this world / hour by seasick hour [… who] always makes you / smile before the door even opens.”  It is refreshing to see a male poet write sensitively about domestic life, and to eschew public for private concerns, but, as here, the poems in The Same Man are sometimes too muted, too quiet in their claims.

 

This leaves me excited, though, for what Elliott might do in his second book.  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, with John Liles’ Bees, and After, the best debut I’ve read in the past year.