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Description
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.
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.
Reviews