We are thrilled to announce that we will be publishing Scott Frey’s Heavy Metal Nursing, the winner of the 2023 Tampa Review Poetry Prize.
Heavy Metal Nursing tells a story of love which, like all love stories, is a story of loss. It is not a sentimental love but a “heavy-metal” one, kneeling arm-to-arm beside parents caring for their daughter born with a severe brain injury who needs intensive care her entire life and dies at three years old. These poems hum the music of oxygen machines and chest compressions and respond to suffering with “half howl, half prayer.” These are poems of vulnerability and pain, but alsoof parenting, caregiving, marriage, medicine, humor, tenderness, affection. Over and over, they ask what it means to be “learning / to make life out of this slow dying.”
Heavy Metal Nursing will be published in Fall 2024.
Early Praise
“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
Scott Frey grew up in Western Pennsylvania and teaches English at Pine Meadow Academy. He learned to teach and found his first writing community at The Landmark School. He then found a wonderful writers’ community during his years teaching at The Ethel Walker School. He also served as a parent advisor for the Pediatric Advanced Care Team at Children’s Hospital, Boston. He and his wife run a non-profit charity, The Charlotte Frey Foundation, whose mission is to help children with multiple handicaps and life-threatening illnesses improve their quality of life. He has work forthcoming in Passages North, december magazine, One, Bellevue Literary Review, and The Missouri Review, where he was awarded the 2023 Perkoff Prize for poetry. His prose chapbook, Night Nurses, was a winner in the 2023 Black River Chapbook Competition. He and his family live in Granby, Connecticut.