The Patriot is the chronicle of a deeply personal attempt to rebuild a sense of self and safety in an unstable environment. Christopher Davis's poems address destructive forces, including the murder of a younger brother and the impact of AIDS on modern gay culture. These elements blend with the dangers of a world in which love and death are cruelly inseparable, and in which the insinuations of consumer culture into the psyche destroy security, but in which dark humor and the beauty of imagery combat despair. In language electric with imagination, these poems utter a mangled, stuttering, contemporary echo of Walt Whitman's poetry, cheated out of its joyous confidence but constructing, in the words of the author, a "weak bridge away from suicide."