“Scott Frey is an astonishing poet, a miracle spinner of life and struggle and love and grief, in a tender, intricate book which will touch everyone who ever suffered, worried, or embraced a child. Heavy Metal Nursing, including the marvelous ‘found poems’ in children’s voices, feels like a miracle of presence and utter life-changing care.”
—Naomi Shihab Nye, author of Cast Away and Everything Comes Next
“In this accomplished debut, Scott Frey plumbs the depths of unthinkable loss in poems that are as formally agile as they are unflinching: prose poems and slant-rhymed pantoums alongside odes to nurses and therapists, a poem-as-instruction-manual for a deep suction machine. What begins as a requiem for the last stages of a daughter’s life deepens into a collection that pushes past fear and devastation—and even death—into something like wonder. This is a speaker I trust, and these poems, ‘half howl, half prayer,’ are powerful testament to the resilience of the spirit.”
—Edgar Kunz, author of Fixer and Tap Out
Order here: https://utampapress.org/product/heavy-metal-nursing-by-scott-frey-preorder-for-november-15-2024
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
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
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
Order here: https://blacklawrencepress.com/books/strange-vigil/
