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A Quilt for David

Steven Reigns

$29.99

Paperback

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English
City Lights Books
04 January 2022
The hidden history of a vulnerable gay man whose life and death were turned into tabloid fodder.

In the early 1990s, eight people living in a small conservative Florida town alleged that Dr. David Acer, their dentist, infected them with HIV. David's gayness, along with his sickly appearance from his own AIDS-related illness, made him the perfect scapegoat and victim of mob mentality. In these early years of the AIDS epidemic, when transmission was little understood, and homophobia rampant, people like David were villainized. Accuser Kimberly Bergalis landed a People magazine cover story, while others went on talk shows and made front page news.

With a poet's eulogistic and psychological intensity, Steven Reigns recovers the life and death of this man who also stands in for so many lives destroyed not only by HIV, but a diseased society that used stigma against the most vulnerable. It's impossible not to make connections between this story and how the twenty-first century pandemic has also been defined by medical misinformation and cultural bias.

Inspired by years of investigative research into the lives of David and those who denounced him, Reigns has stitched together a hauntingly poetic narrative that retraces an American history, questioning the fervor of his accusers, and recuperating a gay life previously shrouded in secrecy and shame.

""Much too long, suffering has been part of our collective queer legacy. We weather the storm of insult to character and seemingly irreconcilable injustice in tandem with the hope that the arc of time will bend towards justice; our time is now. A Quilt for David is a posthumous journal of vindication.""-Brontez Purnell, author of 100 Boyfriends

""A stunning homage to people with AIDS.""-Sarah Schulman, author ofLet the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993

""I found this an incredibly moving book. Reigns deals in hard truths, revisioning one man's life and death, and our collective queer history.""-Justin Torres, author of We the Animals

""A Quilt for David is amazing and so powerful, filled with anger and frustration . . . It's an unforgettable book.""-Marie Cloutier, Greenlight Bookstore, Brooklyn, NY

""Told in short, occasionally haiku-like entries, Reigns has done what literature should: put the reader into the mind, the suffering, of another human being.""-Andrew Holleran, author of Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited

""Steven Reigns lifts David Acer thirty years after his death to show the naked cost of violent, unexamined public opinion around the catastrophe of AIDS. This poetry masterfully documents the tangle of hatred and lies haunting a generation of survivors. I am often grateful for what poems give to me, most especially the ones in this book.""-CAConrad, author of AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration

""This writing is energetic, alive, and uncensored. Through poetry and prose we glean a deep understanding of a life misunderstood and mischaracterized. Reigns goes to the mat to find out what really happened, and with his expert pacing we're right there with him.""-Natalie Goldberg, author of Writing Down the Bones

""One of the most important roles a poet can assume is that of emotional historian. Reigns certainly understands that notion in this necessary and genre-bending book.""-Richard Blanco, 2013 Presidential Inaugural Poet, author of How to Love a Country
By:  
Imprint:   City Lights Books
Country of Publication:   United States
Dimensions:   Height: 209mm,  Width: 139mm, 
ISBN:   9780872868816
ISBN 10:   0872868818
Pages:   132
Publication Date:  
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active

Steven Reigns, Los Angeles poet and educator, was appointed the first Poet Laureate of West Hollywood. He has two previouscollections,InheritanceandYour Dead Body is My Welcome Mat, and over a dozen chapbooks. Reigns editedMy Life is Poetry,showcasing his students' work from the first-ever autobiographical poetry workshop for LGBTQ seniors. Reigns has lecturedand taught writing workshops around the country to LGBTQ youth and people living with HIV. He worked for a decade as an HIVtest counselor in Florida and Los Angeles. Currently he is touringThe Gay Rub,an exhibition of rubbings from LGBTQlandmarks around the world, and has a private practice as a psychotherapist. He lives in West Hollywood, CA.

Reviews for A Quilt for David

Praise for Steven Reigns's A Quilt for David With compassion and perspicacity, A Quilt for David unflinchingly investigates a sordid episode in homophobic history. The result is at once enraging, enlightening, shocking, and heartbreaking. Even people who don't read poetry or history will find it compelling. -Alvin Orloff, Dog Eared Books, San Francisco, CA Praise for Steven Reigns Reigns is a devoted and deeply studied writer. The poetry that emerges from his devotion is autobiographical, accessible, and emotionally bold. His pages bare and share many uncomfortable and inconvenient truths. -Richard Blanco, author of How to Love a Country In Three Pack Jack, acclaimed poet Steven Reigns summons and empowers an amazing variety of gay men before live LA audiences to talk about forbidden subjects. Defying societal shame-fighting even the internalized self-loathing we all of us suffer from to one degree or another-these brave, funny, fiery, guys men present and celebrate. -Kevin Killian, author of Shy, Impossible Princess, Arctic Summer Steven Reigns explores the inexhaustible power of family to affect our lives and loves, and does so in a candid yet passionate manner remarkable for its evocative and wounding moments. -Wanda Coleman, author of Heavy Daughter Blues and Mercurochrome: New Poems . . . A gay life lived with pleasure and bitterness and companionability. It welcomes the reader in and this book is bursting full of relationships whether between siblings or internet dates or married men. Its subject might be the loneliness of how much everybody knows. -Eileen Myles, author of Sorry, Tree and Skies Steven Reign's graceful, plainspoken lyrics describe the shape of one gay life at the beginning of this new century, a time of uncertainty, transformation, and hope. To read his book is to meet a man alert to his times and the textures of the lives around him, a community observed with tenderness, wit and pleasure. -Mark Doty, author of Dog Years and Fire to Fire Steven Reigns' Inheritance sizzles with the unsparing heat of memory. This impressive and soulful collection displays a queer poetics so precise and deft it leaves the reader almost singed by how close to the mark the words flare. -Tim Miller, author of Body Blows and 1001 Beds


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