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 has written a book of devotion, an exhalation that is equal parts elegy and ode, one that reaches for the depths of love for a daughter, from the perspective of a father whose suffering and grief are met with compassion and empathy from tribes of people who meet him along his sojourn. Here is a speaker who pries open the portal to a world where we are summoned to the valleys, cliffs, and vast landscapes of familial loss. I am filled with awe and gratitude and I weep for such an offering." --Tina Chang, author of Hybrida

In poetry of utterly disarming vulnerability, Scott Frey recalls the brief life of a daughter injured at birth. A family shelters and shudders around her, facing impossible choices and resignations. But Frey also bears witness to moments of uneasy hope and true joy: "In the circle we help our kids to clap. Watch them shimmer." Strange Vigil is a work of enveloping empathy--Frey's joins the chorus of voices "trying to help us through the long night." --Craig Morgan Teicher, author of Welcome to Sonnetville, New Jersey

There are things a right-minded person would never wish upon another. Things from which the sufferer never fully recovers. And for some who suffer, the only way through, for however long it takes, is by thinking out loud into familiar forms like poems or memoir. In his Strange Vigil, Scott Frey testifies--in poems and memoir--to suffering; to the community of family, medical staff, and strangers; and to grief. In often fractured narrative, Frey offers strange comfort to those who have endured, as he has, an irreplaceable loss. Not for the faint of heart, this agonized, moving collection is, more than anything else, a love song. And so not without hope. --Brad Davis, author of On the Way to Putnam: New, Selected, and Early Poems

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

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