City Lights. 2021. 128 pages.

Reviewed by James Davis

The batting of Steven Reigns’s book-length poem A Quilt for David is a story of fear and scapegoating from the height of the AIDS crisis, a tale woven through tabloids of the early 1990s but since largely forgotten. Reigns sums it up in an epigraph immediately following his dedication page:

In 1990 a young HIV-positive woman in Florida claimed she was a virgin and that her infection came from her gay, dying dentist. The media believed her, seven others came forward, and a monster was born.

Like so many maligned figures, the monster that becomes David Acer, the book’s titular dentist, was a creation of a public’s panicked instinct toward self-preservation. On his deathbed, Acer was blamed for infecting his patients with dirty instruments, including a grandmother, who likely contracted HIV from a blood infusion. Each of the claimants had their own, particular circumstances of infection, none of which had to do with David. With the help of faulty evidence from the CDC and sensationalist journalism, David and his practice took the fall. It has taken years to exonerate him, and he still inhabits the role of “monster” in many of the minds that remember him.

Onto this heavy foundation, Reigns stitches a hybrid poetry, patches of prose and strips of free-verse sewn together with no strict pattern—connection, not order, is the goal. None of the poems is titled, which tightens each page’s connection to the next. Naturally, Reigns’s Quilt refers to the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, the awe-inspiring 53-ton cooperative art project begun in 1985. In fact, the inspiration is made quite explicit. In one of several sections of free verse that address Acer directly as “you,” the speaker reveals his wish to “sew you into that larger quilt because / no one else has.” Kimberly Bergalis, his first accuser, has multiple panels. The injustice of David’s effacement and Reigns’s labor of restoration make the book a meaningful artifact, as well as a moving work of art: “If I were to prick my finger / and bleed, I wouldn’t regret / a single drop of blood.” Like the AIDS Quilt, Reigns’s project is dutiful and composite in a way that cannot bring its dead to life but does afford them dignity in death.

A quilt’s beauty rests at least as much in the evidence of its making as in what’s made. One surprisingly moving exhibit of Reigns’s process is his nine-page Selected Bibliography, just shy of a hundred separate sources, most from the early to mid-Nineties. Reigns’s sources—the fabric of his quilt—range from People magazine to the Annals of Internal Medicine. They speak to his devotion to the truth. “I decided not to use poetic license,” swears the Preface to this poetry collection. My eyebrow may have raised reading this, but I understood: Reigns wanted to be as careful with these lives as other writers hadn’t. The Preface, too, testifies to the care put into this Quilt.

A loving portrait of David Acer comes through the book’s hybrid patterning. The book’s first lines of verse introduce David amidst a historical, racialized context:

162 in your graduating class
161 men
159 white people
1 Black person
1 Asian person

Part of the accelerated class of 1974
received doctorate diplomas
in March, not June.
Common for Ohio State graduates
you joined the army.
Captain in Germany for two years.

Not the time or place to be out.

The reader sees David as a color and as part of a pattern. He is a white man in a white place at a white time. He is his degree and rank, his “[c]ommon” though hard-earned markers of status. The verse, like David and quilts, isn’t glamorous; it’s sparing with figure, muted in tone, and often cut roughly, in the middle of phrases or after each item of a list. This lends sobriety to the book’s memorializing. While not fussy, the lines are careful, intentional. This first verse page ends on an image that brings David into sharp focus: “The youngest in your class, / you were described as agreeable, shy. / Your white lab coats always pressed and exceedingly neat.” This cotton fragment of David’s coat sewn into the book’s first verse patch reveals the author’s quiet, quilter’s wit. The photo of a handsome, wheat-haired David on the cover is ensouled through such loving gestures.

The Quilt’s other main character is Kimberly Bergalis, David’s first accuser. To fall back on a reductive but structurally useful word, she acts as the book’s antagonist. Diagnosed with AIDS in January 1990, 22 years old, Kimberly made David’s final months nightmarish, not only sinking his practice but also inflicting notoriety on the bashful dentist up until his death on September 3 of the same year. Reigns doesn’t buy Kimberly’s accusations—no one with a contemporary understanding of HIV transmission would. But the book humanizes her as caringly as it does David, giving her the benefit of context, making clear how she suffered under the same systems of sexual repression David did. Both lived in Stuart, Florida, a conservative city in a conservative state of a conservative country. The Quilt includes elements of Kimberly’s legal testimony:

Kimberly testified to
Congress, “I did
nothing wrong …
My life has been taken away.”

Then in a videoed deposition:
Q: Has anybody every performed oral sex on you?
A: Yes.
Q: Was there more than one episode?
A: Yes.

She didn’t do anything wrong.
She did with that man, with other men,
what lovers do, she explored
the pleasures of the body. The clit has more nerve
endings than a fingertip.

A tidier poem would have ended that stanza at “the pleasures of the body.” Reigns’s verse follows the sentiment with the anatomical fact of the clitoris, the raw “nerve” of feeling. For all its solemnity and care, the Quilt is not prim or stuffy. Quilts, like sex, live on beds. The book refuses to separate sex and dignity. Kimberly is not the enemy; stigma is. And who could blame her or David for living inauthentically, seeing the way people with AIDS were treated? Who can blame Kimberly for wanting to preserve her virtue and pay her medical bills?

While the book’s obvious structural metaphor is in the title, the final poem offers an intriguing alternative, the closest thing a quilt has to an antonym: the slot machine. Long after David’s death, the office that housed his practice has become an arcade/casino. The speaker describes playing the slots in this space, at once banal and historic:

I played Robin Hood.
Electronic reels of three images that need
to be aligned to win.
On the ground that I stood, I was
taking risks. The patients took risks, unknowingly.
David took risks, unknowingly.
There are no sure things.
No one comes out clean.
Everyone feels cheated.

The cold randomness of the slots acts as a foil to the warm, human generation of quilting. Ending the book on the former may seem to undermine Reigns’s restorative project. But a memorial can be restorative without being “clean.” Quilts, for all their quaintness, are promiscuous creations, taking material from disparate sources and stitching it together to make one whole. The AIDS Quilt accommodates all comers: the McCarthyite lawyer Roy Cohn is famously memorialized in a panel blazoned with the words “BULLY coward VICTIM.” Unlike Robin Hood, AIDS took from rich and poor alike, especially in the early years of the plague.

Reigns is similarly indiscriminate in the dignity he affords David, his family, Kimberly, her family, and David’s other six accusers. No one comes out clean, but everyone comes out—whole and human. Reigns’ sharpest criticism is reserved not for individuals but for systems: the media that misreported the story; the CDC, whose botched investigation made David’s accusers seem credible. Poetry can achieve what such official documents can’t, embracing the unknown, refusing easy conclusions. And yet, like a quilt, poetry may comfort. Reigns’s Quilt offers both comfort and conviction. As crisis unfolds in the present, it asks who we will believe, and why.

James Davis is a Voertman-Ardoin Fellow at the University of North Texas, where he is pursuing a Ph.D. in creative writing. His debut poetry collection, Club Q, was selected by Edward Hirsch for the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize and published by The Waywiser Press in Fall 2020. His poems have appeared in publications such as Bennington Review, Copper Nickel, The Gay & Lesbian Review, 32 Poems, and two installments of Best New Poets (2011 & 2019). His essays on videogame music appear bimonthly at Cartridge Lit, where his poetry has also been featured. He is the Poetry Editor for American Literary Review. Find him online at jamesdavispoet.com.