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.
