Neither Off the Hook nor Out to Dry

James Ciano interviews Bobby Elliott about his debut poetry collection, “The Same Man.”

By James CianoSeptember 18, 2025

• Poetry

IT’S STRANGE the way poems and poets find us when we most need them. I was father to a not-yet-two-year-old son when I first encountered Bobby Elliott and his debut collection, The Same Man. We connected via social media in the early winter of 2025, and from there struck up a lively correspondence about our poems and the anticipatory anxieties that accompany the excitement and fear of publishing one’s first book. Our correspondence was a balm—Elliott was the first poet-father I really ever had the chance to connect with; as fathers to young sons, we spoke about the concerted effort to break generational cycles, and not just the necessity but the true gift of embracing domestic masculinity in place of the absence we both knew from our own childhood homes. This interview, conducted via email over the course of July and August, is an extension of that shared endeavor.

The Same Man is exacting, spare, rageful yet restrained. Not once do we feel Elliott look away from the painful relationship between the speaker and his father, as the speaker himself stands poised on the precipice of fatherhood. 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?

In 2016, Stephanie Burt wrote about the new poetry of fatherhood, which she notes “is for these writers an alternative to forms of assertion, power, and independence that constitute traditional masculinity.” More recently, in her piece “Harder and Better: The New Masculinity of Fatherhood Poetry,” Emily Pérez expanded upon Burt’s thinking by suggesting that “in many fatherhood poems, bodies are discrete entities, resulting in the intellectual and emotional connection with the child seeming more prominent than the physical connection.” With his debut book, Bobby Elliott has situated himself as a new and necessary voice in the conversation of fatherhood poetry, and has expanded the fatherhood poem to contain connections across the divide of the physical. This collection is a searching portrayal of a committed father not only showing up each day for his son but also simultaneously reckoning with the ways he and his own father both are, and will never be, the same man.

¤

JAMES CIANO: Bobby, we’ve spoken in the past about “the first book,” not only the grueling and many-forked road that publishing one’s first book entails, but also the ways in which it serves as a poetic coming into being, an introduction to the mythologies of the self. What was that process like for you and The Same Man?

BOBBY ELLIOTT: The word that comes to mind is “tumultuous.” I graduated from the University of Virginia’s MFA program in 2019 and it took me at least a year or two to recognize that the full-length manuscript I’d written needed to be scrapped. And that was scary: a recognition that the work, on the whole, just wasn’t ready.

But in the end, it gave me the runway to really figure out what I wanted out of a first book. Suddenly, I was no longer trying to puzzle-piece my way to a manuscript; I was actively shaping it as I was writing new poems (and changing my son’s diaper and doing the laundry and teaching full-time). Momentum started to build, the book started to come into relief, and I started to feel like I was making something I could call my own. And that was the biggest thing: getting to a place of belief so that I could eventually send it out knowing at least where I stood with these poems and with the book as a whole.

The other word that comes to mind when I think about the path I’ve been on with this book is “affirming.” Ultimately, this wild and hard and long process led me to The Same Man and the University of Pittsburgh Press. If you told me years ago that this is where it would lead—as long as I was willing to endure the years it would take to get here—I’d have signed on immediately.

In the acknowledgments to The Same Man, you write, “So much is said about how parenting pulls us away from the things we love—art making included—but not enough is said about what it makes possible.” I love this so much. It feels like a central tenet of your collection; yet, as you point out, it runs contrary to the usual rhetoric we hear about the detrimental effects that children have on our time, energy, and precious solitude. How have you embraced this sense of possibility and generosity in your work as both a poet and a parent?

On the one hand, there’s no question that becoming a parent has meant that I have less time to write. That’s just the reality. And probably like you and every writer-parent out there, I sometimes find myself mourning what I’ve lost and wishing I had another hour or two to be at my desk.

On the other hand, what you lose in time (and sleep), you gain in meaning. That’s been true in my life—becoming a father has been the most powerful and enriching experience I’ve ever had—and it’s been true in my work as well. Ever since holding our firstborn in my arms, fatherhood has been a flood subject for me: what I seek out on the page and can’t get enough of. If we decided against trying to have children, that would have never happened. And The Same Man wouldn’t exist either.

So, I look at my children and am grateful for so much: for the ways they’ve humbled me and taught me what it means to love another person, but also the ways they’ve fed my poems. Sure, I have to wake up earlier than I used to in order to get to my desk before anyone else in the house is awake, but that seems like a pretty low price to pay for such a wellspring of affection and joy. Doesn’t it?

I couldn’t agree more! I love what you’re saying about fatherhood and flood subjects. That’s so evident to me, as I’m sure it will be to everyone who reads The Same Man. Were there other poet-fathers whose work you looked to as an example? I feel Galway Kinnell’s presence in your own tender generosity, but your poems possess the clarity and plainspoken diction of someone like Philip Levine.

What was the journey of getting to The Same Man like? Obviously, you were writing poems before your sons came along. Was there ever a sense of a book before becoming a father, or was fatherhood the magnetic force that pulled your previous work toward it?

Poetry is what taught me that I wanted to become a father in the first place. I can still remember reading Terrance Hayes’s poem “The Same City” from his second book, Hip Logic, back when I was an undergrad. It’s a miraculous poem on so many levels, but the longing to take care of another human being is what I recognized in myself. I wasn’t ready to do that, of course, but I identified with it deeply. I still do.

So, I’d start with Hayes on that list of poet-fathers who’ve had a significant impact on my work. Kinnell is on there too—I’ve been reading him for almost 20 years now—alongside poets like Li-Young Lee, Kevin Young, Edward Hirsch, and Geffrey Davis. They’ve all been vital, as have poets of motherhood, especially Lucille Clifton and Marie Howe. Levine, though not someone I think of as a poet of fatherhood, is an all-timer for me and someone I come back to constantly.

Looking back on it, I needed to become a father to write about my own father. I tried like hell to write a book beforehand, but I always had a sense that the experience of fatherhood would open up doors in life and on the page—and it did. It forced my hand in the best way possible and pushed me into the work of reckoning, which I think this particular book is especially invested in.

This reminds me of the beautiful cover image of The Same Man. It’s a shadow of a father and son on the water, which speaks to you and your father (I’m thinking of the poem “Initiation”) but also to you as a father and your own son. The shadows offer a haunting hologram, in which the legacies and inheritances of family are felt across three generations. Imagery of water often accompanies poems that explore this legacy: in more overt instances, like the poems “Weekend Getaway” or “Big Wave Surfer,” but also in subtler moments, like in the inception poem “The Fall of 1990,” in which you write: “and I bobbed // like a buoy / in my mother’s arms.” Or, later in a poem like “Together,” when you write: “I would hold my breath for as long / as I could without drowning.” The title of the book’s final poem, “Where We Land,” speaks both to a sense of closure or resolution and also to land as terra, and juxtaposed to water. Was this imagistic motif purposeful, and how do you see it working with or against the book’s larger themes of intergenerational fathers and sons?

As I wrote these poems, I wasn’t intentionally creating this motif; my imagination just repeatedly led me to the water and I followed it more or less instinctually. But once I sat down to begin really working toward a coherent whole, it was clear that the motif was already there and, with a few tweaks and adjustments, could become a potent force for the book.

To me, the water is a place of danger and reckoning in The Same Man. My hope—as you suggest—is that the final poem, “Where We Land,” raises this question of closure or resolution without necessarily providing an easy or simple answer. The father and son are under the same roof but overcome with what’s between them and, at the very least, yearning for something else. For some, I think that yearning points to a more unified or hopeful future; for others, it still feels distressing and uneasy—like another shoe will drop, and soon.

Regarding the generational “hologram” of the cover (a beautiful way of describing the work of University of Pittsburgh designer Alex Wolfe) and how the book explores the theme of inheritance: These poems are meant to work their way toward the realization that we carry how we were parented into parenthood. Sometimes that allows for us at least to aspire toward a more loving or accepting or humane form of love, but not always. In the end, none of us are able to overcome our past. We repeat mistakes and make new ones. This is, I hope, enacted by the poems of The Same Man, because it was important to create a portrait of the speaker and his father that’s complex, and leaves neither off the hook nor out to dry.

I feel that sense of self-awareness in the closing lines to “We Hold Each Other in the Kitchen” when you write, in reference to the speaker’s own parents, “I know / a sweetness // in us was once / in them.” But also a deep sense of self-reckoning when, in “Weekend Getaway,” you write: “Do I wince // because I’m jealous // or am I forgiven // for going quiet?”

The book seems an act of coming into or out of language, as a system that both names our world and also obscures that world from us. At one pole, language struggles in its ability to mend our speaker’s relationship with his father. At the other, like Papaw in “Weekend Getaway,” language becomes a way to circumnavigate a speaker’s trauma to build relationships between generations. I’d be curious to hear more about your interest in the materiality of language, and whether writing The Same Man has opened new conversations with your family or yourself.

Your sense of the book, and its relationship to the efficacy of language, lines up with my own. These poems are both a coming into language—a long-simmering, long-deferred claiming of those vowels and consonants “wait[ing] to be touched” in “School Nights”—and a confrontation with the agonizing limitations, challenges, and barriers to that effort.

But what I will say is that you don’t write a book like this if you believe that language is futile; you write a book like this because you believe, as I do, that language is capable, even transformative and freeing. That on the other side of silence there’s a possible world. A world the speaker in these poems is constantly in search of and, sometimes, even glimpsing.

My mentors—especially Rita Dove, Lisa Russ Spaar, Greg Orr, and Paul Guest—reinforced this relationship to language back when I was in grad school at the University of Virginia. And that’s maybe the greatest gift of that program: an abiding belief in language. There was no entertaining the notion that poetry is dead or that it’s beside the point; all our conversations, all our work together, were about how radically powerfully the written word remains in our lives and world.

And I have to say that my experience sharing this book with my loved ones, especially my father, has reminded me of this. As you can imagine, I catastrophized plenty about how he would respond to The Same Man—it was one of the first thoughts I had—and I lost so much sleep over what might happen. But in the end, he’s met these poems with a kind of resolve, a kind of love, that I didn’t see coming. And more importantly, it’s helped us talk about our relationship in terms we never have before. Suddenly, we’re talking about what the next chapter for us looks like, and while I don’t want to sugarcoat it—these have been some of the hardest conversations in my life—none of this would be happening without The Same Man. In a strange way, not only did I need this book: we did.

¤

Bobby Elliott is an award-winning teacher and the author of The Same Man, selected by Nate Marshall as the winner of the 2025 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize from the University of Pittsburgh Press. His writing has recently appeared in or is forthcoming from BOMB, The Cortland Review, Poet Lore, Poetry Northwest, Quarterly West, RHINO, and elsewhere. He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife and sons.