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.