Listen to Bobby Elliott read “The Fall of 1990” from Shō No. 7 (Summer 2025).
About this poem: This is one of the only poems from The Same Man that I wrote during my MFA at the University of Virginia. And it holds a special place for me as an origin poem for the collection – and an effort towards familial empathy and reclamation.
I love poems that detail what the poet couldn’t possibly remember – poems that take us to a time that precedes memory – and I’ve tried to do that here. The competing narratives of this scene are drawn from separate conversations with my father and mother about our move to New York City when I was 18 months old.
Bobby Elliott’s debut collection, The Same Man, was selected by Nate Marshall as the winner of the 2025 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and was published this month by the University of Pittsburgh Press. His writing has appeared in or is forthcoming from BOMB, The Cortland Review, ONLY POEMS, Poet Lore, Poetry Northwest, RHINO, and elsewhere. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife and sons.