Strange Vigil

Taking its title from Whitman’s vigil, kept through the night in a field beside a dying soldier, Scott Frey’s Strange Vigil spans the three years of his daughter’s life, shortened by a brain injury received during her birth and complicated by intensive medical needs. With short prose pieces, lyric essays, and praise poems for G-tubes, nurses, and coworkers, this chapbook invites readers into a wakeful circle of suffering and small heroic gestures of care. Grief and memory echo in the concourse din amid hurried hospital exits and final flights, funerals and all-school assemblies, football games and horror movies, pushing into fraught mixtures of loss and laughter and, ultimately, the wonders that are breath and presence.

Scott Frey is a poet and educator who grew up in Western Pennsylvania and teaches English at Pine Meadow Academy in Windsor Locks, Connecticut. He and his wife, Meryl, run a non-profit charity, The Charlotte Frey Foundation, whose mission is to help children with multiple handicaps and life-threatening illnesses and their families improve their quality of life. His book, Heavy Metal Nursing, won the Tampa Review Prize for poetry. Among other places, his work has been published or is forthcoming in Passages North, december magazine, The Adroit Journal, Bellevue Literary Review, New York Quarterly, and The Missouri Review, where he was awarded the Perkoff Prize for poetry. He and his family live in Granby, Connecticut. Visit him online at scottfrey.org