When Nate Marshall called to tell me I’d won the 2025 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, I lost it. Jumped for joy. Wept. Could not—in any way—keep it together. What I’d longed for, and worked toward, for almost two decades was happening. I was elated.
I also wondered if Nate called the wrong person—if, in the exchange of numbers between final judge and press, mine was somehow sent by accident. And in the days after the call, as I waited to receive official word from the University of Pittsburgh Press that I had indeed won the prize, I woke often in the middle of the night, sure that there’d been an error and imagining the emails I’d have to write to the few loved ones I’d already told: I don’t know how to say this, but there was a mistake. It turns out, I didn’t win . . .
*
When I think of shame, I think of how, in my teens and early twenties, I used to stand in front of mirrors and smile. I did this when no one else was around, and for one reason only: to see if my left front tooth was darker than the rest of my teeth.
Certain mirrors, certain angles, were more forgiving, but always, eventually, confirmed what a student dentist at NYU told me matter-of-factly one afternoon: I’d been walking around for years with a front tooth everyone could see was discolored. He then whisked me away to the “aesthetics department,” where he went over how quickly they could fix it for a price I knew I couldn’t afford.
Later that night, I met up with friends from college at a small sushi restaurant in the East Village. We drank sake bomb after sake bomb, my vomit the next morning black from soy sauce, my tooth—in the mirror of my tiny childhood bathroom—irrefutably dark.
*
In some ways, The Same Man getting picked up came out of nowhere—I had only just begun sending my poems out again after years of steering clear of the slush pile—but it was not, I have to remind myself, a fluke, or some act of cosmic pity.
After graduating from the MFA program at the University of Virginia in 2019, I spent two years trying to figure out if my book-length thesis was an actual book or, as Mark Doty gently suggested, just the appearance of one.
Ultimately, I sided with Mark. I scrapped the whole thing. As my friends were winning first book prizes and landing poems in the same journals I was getting rejections from, I started over, heading to my desk before our newborn son woke up and returning to it during his naps.
It was humbling, and exactly what I needed. I wasn’t on social media or sending my work out—I was simply seeing the new poems through, letting them take shape and come into relief on the page, before getting up to change a diaper or fold the laundry.
There was a purity to it, I recognize now, but also a deep-seated refusal to give up. I was not going to let doubt and fear win out. I was not going to go down that easy.
*
When I think of shame, I also think of my mother and father. My father—the son of a famous comedian I am named after and the older brother of a successful actor, and my mother—the product of a 1950s middle class upbringing in Lorain, Ohio, decades before the decimation of its industrial base. Both haunted by shame, especially around money. Both deeply unhappy in their marriage.
As a child, I clocked how unfounded their shame was. I could see, as my older sister could, that they were trying to make ends meet in a city, New York, that was merciless to people struggling to pay the phone bill. I could see that they’d tried to stay together, but couldn’t. It was making them, and us, miserable.
And for a long time, I thought this recognition, which felt so automatic and obvious to me, saved me from making the same mistakes. That I could move into the life ahead of me capable of avoiding self-loathing, of honoring my own decency—even my capacity to love and to be loved.
*
I can remember one night in particular. Six months after my visit to NYU, I was studying at Oxford with the British poet and translator Jamie McKendrick and living off of a $5,000 Gilman Scholarship from the now-gutted U.S. Department of Education.
“Bops”—themed weekly dance parties hosted at the various Oxford colleges—were a rite of passage and, not surprisingly, hard for me to endure. But I tried, drinking to keep up with my new British friends, to be drunk enough to join them on the dance floor. On this night, I found myself letting loose and dancing in a group that included an English major I had an almost unbearable crush on as soon as I heard her speak. As one song melded into another, as I kept drinking and moving, I closed my eyes. The freedom, in the moment, was ecstatic.
When I opened my eyes again, I was alone, the people I’d been dancing with nowhere to be seen—shame flooding me like milk floods a kitchen table. I left immediately, walking home in the rain, repeatedly hitting myself over the head for how stupid I’d been to show up in the first place, to try.
I sometimes wonder what people driving by thought that night, whether any of them considered pulling over in the rain and asking if I needed help.
*
There’s no way to know if I’ve endured more rejection as a writer than anyone else; if I’ve learned anything over this past year, it’s that we all have chips on our shoulders, ways we feel slighted or overlooked. The poet with two books in the world is looking at the poet with three; the poet who won the National Book Award can’t figure out why they can’t win the Pulitzer.
What I do know is that rejection has had a hold on me, and my sense of shame, for as long as I can remember. Even as I write this essay, I’m aware that an editor will soon evaluate it and determine whether it deserves to be published. (I’ve already imagined that email, too: Dear Bobby, Thank you for sending us your work. While it’s not a fit for us at this time . . .).
And while I’ve managed to keep going, to not let rejection stop me altogether, I’m always contending with the damage it does. For me (and this separates me from some of my friends and peers), it has never been some kind of game or competition; it is always high stakes, always a test of my wherewithal, always a mirror.
As much as I’d like to talk myself out of this relationship with rejection, I can’t. The best I can do, at this stage, is to be conscious of its impacts. To be conscious of how quickly it turns a poem I’m excited about into a marred, and marring, thing.
*
Before starting to send The Same Man out in March 2024, I spent weeks trying to prepare for the rejections to come and the very real possibility that the book might never see the light of day. Going into that experience, my priority was to protect both my writing practice and my belief in the book I’d written.
The poems were made in the image of the poems and poets I love most. They were not afraid to be what they were—about fathers and sons—and saw splashiness for what it was (and will always be). And, that spring, with a three-and-a-half year old in our midst and an infant, I was willing to step out with them, to weather what awaited me.
I’ll never know if I was capable of pulling that off—if, after years of rejection, I would have kept turning to my desk, kept believing in the merit of my own work when the prize world didn’t—but there’s no question that it was a necessary place for me to operate from. I was aware of the odds, and the stakes, and I was attempting to accept—or at least wrap my head around—the fact that I might never “make it,” especially in the ways I’d envisioned for so long.
Above all, I see now that I was attempting to see the dignity in myself as a poet, to be the one to make that call first.
*
In “What We See Together,” one of the only poems from The Same Man that I can read aloud to my sons, there’s an image I often return to of a “painter / in her studio unknown / and painting.”
The image, as the images in my poems almost always are, is cast from real life: the painter lives a few blocks away from us and can be seen just about every day of the week working in her garage-turned-studio. She’s in her 80s now and doesn’t sell or show her paintings, but keeps the door to her studio open for passersby.
When I first met her—our dog sniffing around the base of her giant oak tree, our son pointing to the squirrels on its branches—I was just beginning to work on The Same Man. And I regarded her as a tragic, almost embarrassing figure, exactly the kind of artist I didn’t want to be: someone the rest of the world had told, again and again, to stop, but who didn’t listen.
I am embarrassed by how I saw her then. I see now that she is, in fact, the kind of artist I want to be: as disciplined as it gets, as serious as it gets, and strong enough—dignified enough—to keep going. I don’t know what resentments, if any, she harbors; I don’t know how she has weathered the art world and its negation of her (or even that she cares). What I know is that she’s been able to persist, to spend her days doing what we all want to be doing. To be, in her work, a north star for us all.
*
How do you cultivate self esteem without being dependent on external recognition or praise? How do you meet rejection without it getting in the way of your view of yourself, your work, your practice?
These are the questions I am asking. They are also the questions I don’t have answers for.
*
When I try to take stock of the last year, it has been an unmistakably good one. My book is with a respected press powered by skilled and good people who’ve championed my poems and welcomed me into the fold. The work has seemed to resonate with readers, including poets I look up to, and it has ushered in a new phase of my life and career.
It is a moment my poems have, I hope, earned. It is also just a moment—the first book buzz moves on—and will be followed by more turbulence. And that turbulence will continue to ask the same questions it has always asked: Am I up for this? Can I withstand the inevitable lows that are on their way?
*
Picking up a friend’s book from a local bookstore a few weeks ago, I lingered in the poetry aisle, our youngest son bucking in my arms and ready for lunch.
Lately, I’ve started to look for my book whenever I step into a bookstore, smarting from its absence or wondering why it hasn’t sold when it’s on the shelf. This time around, the bookstore had four copies of The Same Man, which my son immediately reached for as soon as he spotted them. I slid out a copy and he held it in his hands, briefly, before turning it over, pointing to the picture of me—smiling in the lower left hand corner—and shouting, all glee, Daddy!
***
