Amie Zimmerman. False Spring. New York: Roof Books, 2026. 91 pages.

 



            “the street is not a metaphor” (39) appears near the middle of an otherwise blank page. The text veers far to the left. Contrasting the pages surrounding, composed of line clusters scattering across, here simplicity is a spotlight. The declaration confronts. No, the street isn’t a metaphor, carrying vehicles of meaning here to there; nor is the street a noplace from which our selves get rearticulated from one locale to the next; nor is the street a sign, lines on a map representing space but dislocated from it. It is nothing so unrealized and dissociated from its actuality. It is not a figure. But it is a commons, a gathering, a substrate of human connectivity, the veins of the city, a chokepoint, an infrastructural node to be effectively exploited by resisters. An opening, it is where we gather when we push back. In False Spring, Amie Zimmerman’s debut collection, we encounter a poetry insisting on naming things as they are rather than as they are made to appear, looking straight in the eyes of our material conditions, and steadfastly refusing any anesthetizing aestheticization of our political reality. The street is a street. A poem is not a protest, and a “shield is not a language object, / it is a street object // on sacred pavement” (36).

Things are what they are. “When I say I hate cops I mean I hate cops. / To mutter this means nothing. / To write a poem or a paper changes / little—” Zimmerman writes (24). Writing a poem or a paper is not equated with mere muttering, but proximity can be a teacher. A mutter is ineffective multiply, as it fails to convey its message while inadvertently conveying the message that the speaker is, if not a coward or weak, then otherwise disinterested in the social space being shared. To write a poem or a paper in the face of fascism—as one’s response to the unveiling face of fascism—maps analogously to this. Throughout False Spring, Zimmerman’s poems disarticulate the politics of poetry from the politics of getting out into the street. Written first from her experiences in Portland during the summer of 2020 Black Lives Matter uprising, and emerging also from her time as a labor organizer in upstate New York, the poems in False Spring return us continually to the practice of real life, with all of the attendant focuses on labor, materiality, the exercises of power, the unrelenting work of struggle. “My enemy wraps life in a death cloth / I trundle behind making snips where I can” (45), Zimmerman tells us, but this isn’t a call to doomerism or some similar nonsense: this is the cycle of struggle bubbling up on the page consistently as it does in an attentive consciousness. Zimmerman attends to the conditions of struggle in this book, conditions which are not, to be clear, romantic: “I’m chopping off my hand to have something to throw. / I need that hand to work” (24). Those same hands that would be used to write about a tragedy via a poetics of witness are used instead to lob part of the self as a weapon as response: a part of the self that is sacrificial, for one needs oneself to work—to socially reproduce oneself—and one needs the weapon to do its job, for what else have we?

The selection of tools and methods is also, Zimmerman shows us, a teacher: “we choose our children by feeding them” (81). False Spring does many things as it ranges from institutional critique to the joyful solidarity of protest to the reckoning of the feeling of incommensurate action in the face of empire to the coming into one's political consciousness, and more. But what strikes so consistently is the rejection of a poetics of witness, from which vantage point we might be inclined to perceive poetic action as action, or the transcription of a moment in time as a response to that moment’s grievables. It is a poetry where “we gather spent ordnance stacking in secret as evidence that we / cost them something” (22), but the bombs are still dropping. I think here of the opening poem of Wendy Trevino’s Cruel Fiction, a remembrance of Trevino’s detention in Santa Rita Prison during Occupy Oakland in 2012 [1], or of Diane di Prima’s Revolutionary Letters: poems that are political in the sense of speaking from, rather than speaking for, the historical-material conditions that shape our shared present. When Zimmerman writes in “Surplus” of the violence and institutional cruelty she’s received during her work as a labor organizer at SUNY Albany, the moments surface as part of an emergent reckoning with the broader world from which these events grew. In the poem, Zimmerman writes, “The university president criticized me for invoking suffering / metaphorically then walked away when I told him about the / going price of plasma” (24). While Zimmerman writes later in the same poem, “Sometimes my poems feel like a transcript—” (25), this work is not about the transcription of an event, but a naming of the real by shearing off the adornments and accoutrements placed in service of opacity by the powerful. The rhetorical shiftiness—or, to quote June Jordan, “doublespeak-bullshit/nonthink standard English of the powers that be”—of those in power is on clear display: a literal statement of suffering is twisted by the university president into being mere metaphor and, due to its supposed figurative flair, dismissible; a rejection of this perverse twisting in the form of a damning question is responded to with a dismissive retreat, for one of the tools of power is to reject a framing based on the real in favor of one it manipulates and controls.

The doublespeak-bullshit of power bubbles up throughout “Surplus,” with Zimmerman showing it for what it really is: “The chief of staff asked what he could do to help so we hung / ourselves. Be here when I get back from my shift”; “where is the collaborative meaning-making / in payroll” (25). Zimmerman shows us as well the performativity of care in academia, where being seen as responsive to concern is valued more highly than responding itself: “I cried in the finance office. / She was struggling with the ethics / of acknowledgement. / My responsibility to perform a plausible / narrative. The institution demands / to be wooed” (26). Consistently in Zimmerman’s poems in False Spring there is an insistence on a threaded articulation of interconnection, as moments or flashes are followed without transition to another. The seeming unrelation of these individual moments gives way in their accumulation, as the reader begins to see crosscurrents forming: the above moments from Zimmerman’s experiences fighting the fight of labor in her university are interspersed with strands of thought, event, experience, retrospection, critique, and feeling. The result is less a collage and more an attempt to distend beyond the self-interest of a single moment one has experienced themselves and into a more capacious view of what’s happening in the webs we’re in. The best way to see clearly isn’t always to look inward. We don’t need more navel-gazing, which is self-defeating: we aren’t individuated, and we can’t see ourselves as if we are outside of the collective, anyway. The closer you look inwardly, the further away you get from yourself. As Zimmerman writes in another poem, “pursuit of self is / eased by looking up” (29).

“deconstructing the personal into a load bearing transaction is the goal of politic” (81), something visible across the present, as the systemic is displaced by the local, solidarity is assaulted by individuation, and everything in sight is subjected to the reductive rays of discourse. “The next person who mentions holding space is getting / a punch to the throat” (75), Zimmerman writes, and beyond an admittedly pleasing catharsis, the lines speak to the ways that the powerful have—to borrow from Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò—taken advantage of people’s demands for a better world, weaponizing the language, feeling, and discursive structure of these movements to attack the movements themselves. Zimmerman’s poetry radiates with not just awareness, but fury at this. In the face of such willful contradiction, one is tempted to quote from Zimmerman: “Eat a bag of dicks, thoughtfully” (26). A hum of righteous anger buzzes off the page, but rather than drowning, Zimmerman channels it into a poetics of naming: of unnaming the lies of the powerful, naming one’s enemies, naming the real that those who rule us insist on distorting to their own profitable ends. “this war is a real war / voting can’t fix // if we organize around the kindness principle / we’ll get bullets in our eyes” (15), Zimmerman writes: this war is not a metaphor, and voting in an undemocratic empire will not staunch the bleeding, for “what are clouds in a catastrophic flood” (20).

Poetry is too often used as a site where dissenters stage safe encounters with power. Some of us imagine the poem itself as a mode of pushing back, where “poetry is political” elides with an assumption that the writing and publishing of a poem is itself an action that leaves an impression on the thin paper of the world. But the world can’t be so easily metaphorized, and metaphors are not Molotovs. What is it that the Language writers learned? You can write poems targeting the canalization of language, thought, and human existence itself as it has been squeezed into individuation by capital, and you can in return get a tenure-track job in the university that is itself dedicated to the project of canalization and to the molding of students into productive workers. One cannot write socialism into being, and a poster isn’t a strike. What is it that poets in the decades following learned about the, to borrow again from Táíwò, elite capture of institutions, including the varying institutions of contemporary poetry, who funded diversity initiatives with pharmaceutical blood money and who attempted to articulate an image of justice while remaining silent on genocide? In an echo of Walter Benjamin (whose name graces the title of a recurring series of poems in the book), Zimmerman tells us that “reform is the site of reified harm / the horror of this continuing unchecked / into acquiescence” (16). But for us, the Angel of History is not obscured by the misunderstandings of historical materialism by the vulgar Marxists, but by the veils placed onto the real and which we must work hard to yank off and burn. Do we see things as they are? And do we respond in turn? For “if you haven’t learned we are a whetted wedge then remember your position in the midst” (81).






Works Cited

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di Pima, Diane. Revolutionary Letters. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2021. 

Jordan, June. Moving towards Home: Political Essays. London: Virago, 1989. 33.

Táíwò, Olúfẹ́mi O. Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else). Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2022.