How can we speak of a deep and terrible loss? Scott Frey’s Heavy Metal Nursing, winner of the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry, shoulders this difficult task with brutal honesty and compassion. The collection chronicles the birth, care, and eventual loss of a child born with a traumatic brain injury. Situated in hospital rooms, medical clinics, and later cemeteries, Frey’s poems span an ocean of grief—its ebbs and flows, how it swells and threatens to drown. Immersing us in these dark waters, Heavy Metal Nursing converts the unspeakable into something sacred. As Frey notes in the poem “New Neighborhood,” a mere slip of a finger on a keyboard “from v to c, turns grave to grace.”

“7 North (NICU, Children’s Hospital Boston)” opens with the speaker in the first hours and days of his daughter’s life, as he stands by in the children’s hospital waiting room, expecting news of her condition. We witness the intrusive, necessary bustle of medical interventions, the sterile blues of the hospital, the anxious dread. While in the waiting room, another parent offers the speaker a plate of food— a form of initiation, a rite of passage. “Take and eat,” the parent insists, extending “this hand / out of the wilderness.” It is this small human act, this gift of sustenance, that carries us to the poem’s devastating conclusion.

     …Even after

     you learn the next day that what’s broken

     in your daughter cannot be mended,

     you’ll take chips and a cup and pass them

     to the couple one bay over

     while their son’s behind the blue curtain

     and they step for the first time

     into the room before learning

     to make life out of this slow dying.

These small acts of compassion passed along from parent to parent root our attention to this pivotal moment, a dawning awareness of the severity of their situation. It is life-and-death. The juxtaposition is powerful. How better to convey this bereavement than in the tiny acts of kindness that undergird it? The beauty and power of this collection lie in its attention to detail, its ability to sit in the small moments to reveal their emotional core.

Frey’s poems pay tribute to the nurses and caregivers who offered both their tears and tireless service. Those who would care for a child with no hope, no future. Those who remain throughout the dark times, sharing small kindnesses where they can. This is the spirit of Heavy Metal Nursing. “Pink Feather Boa” is one such poem dedicated to a particular nurse who continued to care for their daughter after the “Do Not Resuscitate” form was revised and their daughter began hospice care. The poem describes this nurse, Diane, who

     shouldered the extra hours,

     and later stepped to the podium

     wearing a pink feather boa

     at our daughter’s funeral

     to speak of the lightness

     she felt when holding her.

“Pink Feather Boa” is a love song to the individuals who “walk us / through the door of our daughter’s // last breath.” Those caregivers who continue on in spite of everything, and do so with compassion and gentleness to the end. Those who not only do the messy work of nursing, but also the often-unspoken labor of bearing witness to death alongside the parents.

“A Difficult Stick,” the opening poem of the collection’s third and final section, beautifully encapsulates the agony of the daughter’s prognosis in medical metaphor. The poem’s title speaks with specificity to the daughter’s struggle from birth: the difficulty in finding her veins, for the “stick” of the needle, the pain of entry. “A Difficult Stick,” much like the entire collection, does not shy away from confronting hard truths.  The poet addresses his newfound difficulty integrating with the rest of the world in the aftermath of caring for his daughter. Everyone else remains distracted by their own suffering, which necessarily pales by comparison. Frey asks, “How to cross this distance?”:

     …How we can look

     from its plunger down the barrel

     to the hub where the needle emerges

     and not turn away. How we can look

     along its edge and keep our gaze there

     until its tapered point opens

     and we see the little reed

     through which the blood is removed

     or what we need is delivered.

This is the gift of Heavy Metal Nursing. A gift passed on plates from parent to parent; a gift given by the nurses and caregivers who steadily and lovingly deliver the needle to the tiny arm; by those who do not look away; by those who stay until the very end. It is a gift now bestowed upon the reader by the poet: the gift of facing the difficult stick, of seeing suffering for what it is and holding it in attention. This act of bearing witness, too, is an act of love. This is where we might find what we need, our humanity and our grace.

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