At some point in the thankless, free labor of writing book reviews, writers and publishers begin to enlist your services. ARCs begin showing up in your email or, even more mysteriously, in your mailbox, oftentimes with impersonal little notes which are clearly drafted for a larger solicited group. The whole personal project of highlighting the work that excites you begins to feel a little exploited, once again collapsing the increasingly indistinguishable reality between one’s free-time and one’s labor-time. However, amid the noisy, aimless emails and feckless attempts at, essentially, brand conscription, sometimes a special poet reaches out. Sometimes that poet is someone you have known for years––someone whose work, politics, and personal world-making you deeply respect. In a way, you have been waiting for this contact for years as you have circled one another in various orbits and peregrinations, taking note of the new projects, the new forms, the new poems, always anticipating the next and the newest iteration.
For us, floating intentionally over here at NOIR SAUNA, this poet is Amie Zimmerman, whose debut collection, False Spring, is now available from Roof Books. While we don’t believe that any form of “writing about writing” can ever achieve objectivity (as if that is even some kind of aspiration), our review of Amie’s book will be the furthest thing from neutral, apolitical, or impersonal. In fact, it will likely demonstrate our pathetic, and ultimately meaningless, favoritism for Amie and her work. We have slept on a blow-up mattress in Amie’s home in Troy. We have spent hours discussing the overlap of poetry and praxis in a car from Poughkeepsie to Kingston, in a random cafe near Rittenhouse Square, in Amie’s living room over tea, and through numerous emails, texts, and digital discourses. When we began this project back in January of 2024, Amie was the very first poet we solicited. There is no way for us to engage with Amie’s work that is not also a form of structural solidarity and we think that the poems in False Spring are asking for exactly that.
There are those that posit that all poems are political. There are those that posit the opposite. We don’t like any form of totalitarian thought from either side of the political spectrum, so we will not be advocating any such ideological prescription. However, in Zimmerman’s work the poem and the activism are two components of a larger social dialectic––they are inseparable. It is work that harkens back to Diane di Prima who said “I have just realized that the stakes are myself,” or Amiri Baraka who said “Fuck poems and they are useful.” Zimmerman’s False Spring is a collection that straddles this impregnable question of the poem-as-praxis and the poet as the body politic. She understands that these are, in many ways, incommensurable worlds, the literary space often codified by bourgeois freedoms of the abstract, which is a cultural product of leisure rather than urgency. The abstract space of the poem incentivizes us to luxuriate in the discourse of its meaning rather than act on critical enlightenment.
Poetry-as-praxis must make certain things very clear and Zimmerman wastes no time to proffer these distinctions. “When I say I hate cops,” she says at the beginning of the poem “Surplus,” “I mean I hate cops. / To mutter this means nothing. / To write a poem or a paper changes / little––I am not fooled.” Zimmerman seems to be channeling the Miguel James line, “Toda mi obra es contra la policia.” “Surplus” addresses the impossible stakes of the poem or, more specifically, the work of the poem. Writing itself is not the material answer to the larger systemic injustices we face, but it also must be careful not to prevaricate the severity of these same injustices. Zimmerman makes the political plain, but then also addresses the structural problems of its acknowledgment––that it changes nothing. “Poems are bullshit,” Baraka says, “unless they are / teeth or trees or lemons piled / on step.” Where Baraka previously delineates the poem’s social application, Zimmerman has extrapolated further, attempting to locate further possibilities of political intervention. “I’m chopping off my hand to have something to throw,” she tells us, “I need that hand to work.” Like Di Prima before her, Zimmerman is also stating that the stakes are her own subjectivity. Her severed hand becomes a working metaphor for the function of the poem, the appendage, removed of its structural functionality, is a desperate weapon in a crisis––the subject with no other choice than to begin to dismantle itself in order to dismantle its parasitic system. The body politic is a body after all. This is not a metaphor. The ramifications of our physical body, as Naomi Klein demonstrates in her work on shadow selves, lives a secondary political life. The water we consume, the businesses we do or do not patronize, our use of AI, or social media, or search engines, our consumption of petrol, or ground beef, or fast fashion, all live out very real political consequences. In order to dismantle our complicity in these same parasitic political spaces, we must also dismantle ourselves.
The theme of drawing the material out of the abstract runs constant through these poems. For Zimmerman, it may be a way of demonstrating a vital dialectical materialism while also delimiting what the language is set to do. These are Marxist poems after all. “Poems that wrestle cops into alleys,” as Baraka states, “and take their weapons leaving them dead.” The aforementioned “Surplus” clearly demonstrates the exploitation of both surplus value as well as surplus labor. Zimmerman’s poems also trace a longer, more extraneous system of hegemonic power. To hate cops, for instance, is to also hate the truly wealthy, as the cops are a mere apparatus preserving the overreach of capital and the privatization of property. False Spring is a collection that is astutely wary of these elaborate, serpentine extensions of power.
Zimmerman continues this critical engagement in “The Street is Not a Metaphor,” which, from the very beginning, is instructing the reader’s interpretation. The poet is holding our attention accountable, if not captive. She is staging an intervention in meaning: as if to say “don’t you fucking dare romanticize the worker’s struggle for a fucking second.” Zimmerman, who has worked the majority of her life as a hairstylist, understands the exigent needs for those of us working in service and trade, those of us living paycheck to paycheck, those of us without union representation or paid leave or healthcare––the many of us, the most of us. In a time when every silver-spooned academic wants to be a Marxist but only through the elite and inaccessible conduits of critical theory, having real, material ties to working-class conditions establishes far more credibility than whether one has read Grundrisse. “The Street is Not a Metaphor” contains the palpable anger and exhaustion of wage labor. “Each time money / creates the unbearable,” Zimmerman tells us, “there are those who can't wait to be born.” The overt inequalities of capital are laid bare. The exploitative conditions by which money must be withheld in the form of surplus labor are also what generate its profit. This is the dialectic between the unbearable and the parasitic profiteer or, more generally, the lord–bondsman dialectic. However, Zimmerman puts this dynamic into greater emotional perspective by exploring the inherent shame we incur around the manufacture of our poverty.
people embarrassed to name their relation to poverty
is to be embarrassed by––hear me out––a construct
none of us who work a shift
know the truly wealthy
Poverty, we know, is not an intrinsic quality, nor is it a condition of personal failure. Poverty is a necessary condition within capitalism to yield the most surplus labor out of the worker who is under the illusion that their labor-time is being compensated. The ultra rich cannot exist without poverty. Zimmerman is unionizing the poem. She is disseminating agitprop in the workplace. The momentum of “The Street is Not a Metaphor” is a gradual galvanization of burnout, disillusionment, and cataclysmic anger––it is the momentum of class consciousness beginning to form. Zimmerman’s language oscillates between pragmatism and prosody. The contrast of these modes of language can be disorienting, but we must assume there is a function to this disorientation.
the ground, our feet are starlings and
gift of flame
zero
sons of fortune many-eyed seraph of 3rd &
Madison
we know the promise is to uphold property
in service of wealth; we cannot name our
embarrassment
drunk, stumbling witness in the street
the street is not a metaphor
There is a structural contradiction between Zimmerman’s use of metaphor and her instruction against it. She is creating a physical altercation of meaning, which is true to the nature of protest, and to the political optics of demonstration as a public forum. These are both internal and external conflicts of meaning which can mirror both the disagreements of praxis within a movement, and/or the various apparatuses of suppression deployed to shut down the movement. Either way, the worlds of pathos and ethos inevitably collide. Zimmerman brings these worlds together as harmoniously as possible while also demonstrating their inevitable tension.
Near the center of False Spring is the book’s longest poem, “On the Nature of Bondage,” which we were fortunate enough to publish in the very first ISSUE of NOIR SAUNA. This is the first time that we have reviewed a book that we can link back into our own website and we’d be lying if we said we weren’t amused by the digital ouroboros that we’ve created here. At the center of this poem is the speaker’s body. The body here is not an ontic constant, but a malleable, mutable, mobilized set of valences. There is the political body, the erotic body, the filial body, the weaponized body, the symbolic body, et al. Sometimes these contexts merge or overlap. Other times they do not. We are ourselves, after all, only in relation to other things. The attention of “On the Nature of Bondage” is onanistic, but this is also complicated, because it requires us extrapolate both the political agency as well as the ontology of the masturbatory act. The speaker’s body is situated in an impasse of agency––more specifically, when is the self a subject and when is the self an object? The praxis of protest is often to make an object of oneself. The body is an abutment, or a shield, or a brick––overall a merging, collective obstacle. However, the activists whose voices galvanize us are subjects, which makes their inevitable sacrifices (often their lives) all the more radical. This dialectic between subject and object is mirrored in many contexts. In the context of sex, we place our bodies in a set of conditions we cannot always control. We cannot control whether the person we have reached this momentary agreement with is fucking the larger ontological us or merely the fetish of our bodies. In the case of masturbation we are the sole subject, the sole body, and the sole source of agency. We can shift and reshape in the luxurious space of our own fantasy. Zimmerman’s onanism is not merely sexual, it is political, it is intentional, it is a radical space of understanding the body’s potential as well as its limitations. Lest we’ve lost you, here are Zimmerman’s own words:
I am here, if I must, to suffer
//let me step in front of me
//let me take my bullet
//let me love unremittingly myself
//let me fail myself
//let me be there when I die
The intention and awareness of the body is not inherently sexual here, but just wait, dear reader, because Zimmerman is outlining the political space of the body for the irruption of the sexual, which occurs thus:
I am not out here listening forlornly to birds
it’s like my vagina penis can’t get enough
I meant it’s everywhere all the time
––the bloom of knowledge that follows––
I needed to lie and grieve the lie as well
selfish sex can be the only contract
do I lie?
The genital space is merged just as the political and sexual spaces are merged. When Zimmerman mentions her “vagina penis” being “everywhere all the time” she is addressing an onanistic continuum that Michel Foucault addresses in The History of Sexuality. The masturbatory act, to Foucault, is an invention used to pathologize sexual deviancy––it is a pathology of institutional power. The ontological perimeters of masturbation are difficult to define because, as Zimmerman mentions, our genital selves are simply happening everywhere all of the time––inseparable from our political or social bodies. “On the Nature of Bondage” merges all of these worlds in an intentionally messy mosaic––the self viewed both intrinsically and extrinsically, socially and personally, politically and privately, sexually and economically. It is an honest display of our own convoluted transformations of form and feeling––resolute and solemn one second and recklessly aroused the next––a goddamn human condition if there ever was one. The poem’s final line: “let me drip the self miserly” leaves us with a paradox of form, the body not fully free even unto itself, its subjectivity still parsimoniously controlled, leaving us to question perhaps, “Is the ego a capitalist after all?”
Zimmerman’s debut comes at a time when too few writers, publishers, and academic institutions are drawing lines in the sand, from the cultural boycott against Israel to the work of a known technofascist showing up in a small online journal to independent poets revealing their alignment with far-right ideologues. False Spring is an uncompromising political text for an uncertain era of spurious media, violent authoritarianism, accelerationist capitalism, ethnic cleansing, et al, et al, et al. It is not a utopian work. It does not postulate a neat blueprint to equity or collectivism. It is not a revolution in itself but, as Adrienne Rich addressed, the parrhesia that reminds us why revolution is necessary. Zimmerman is drawing a line in the sand and she is willing to throw her fucking hand at the tank if she runs out of stones.