Compliance by Amie Zimmerman

Abstract

Reviewed by: Compliance by Amie Zimmerman Wm. Anthony Connol (bio) Amie Zimmerman. Compliance. Essay Press, 2018. Several years ago, I found myself in the Vermont woods with the writer and intellectual Sarah Schulman. She said writers are freaks—outsiders. And that we, writers, should celebrate and cultivate this identity. Schulman told me and a smattering of other tyro artists at Goddard College's low-res MFA in Writing program that history was replete with writers as outsiders, such as The Marquis de Sade, who wrote from prison using his own excrement; like the gay, German, Jewish, poet, who wrote in idiosyncratic code during the Nazi regime; like Kathy Acker's sexual exploits upon the page at the turn of the last century. Not only does history provide us with these renegades, but writers also adopt such stances, this desire to be on the outside looking in. And, of course, forces compel some into this distinction as well. Plainly, we're a lusus naturae, as Aristotle once opined of my tribe—a people on different rungs than most others. We tend not to conform, nor comply, offered my writing mentor; we disturb, disrupt and fete differences with a zeal borne either by pure temperament or by how we've received our wounds. I gladly find Amie Zimmerman in the ranks of outsiders with the publication of her micro-essay chapbook Compliance from Essay Press. Within the chapbook, Zimmerman's a "… zealot of something" eager to perform, investigate, [End Page 248] and complicate the lingua franca of her physical and mental milieu. "We wait as hundreds of years become thousands, for the salvation, impatient; we take it into our hands & fashion the truth to conform to our experience of the decade, the year, the moment in front of us," she writes in the essay "Star." Compliance is an effort to define one's own identity as a woman while inside of the distortion of abuse and the inability to access language to name it. The quality of Compliance places her alongside the work of Selah Satertrom, Maggie Nelson, Jenny Boully, and Mary Ruefle, to name a few. What is before Zimmerman in these concise mediations is the issue of trust: trust of oneself, trust of one's own language, the veracity of memory and what this ultimately produces in terms of what we come to value and what we come to know. There are fourteen micro-essays in this chap-book, with titles like "Hip," "Table," and "Bed," and in toto reads like a perzine Ludwig Wittgenstein might have produced should he be alive and kicking today. In any interrogation of language and its uses and misuses, outsiders tend to turn first upon themselves. "Writing from the film of memory," Zimmerman begins the chapbook, her goal is to find out what is "happening…" or happened, in the topography of her body and her mind, which left a trace of some kind upon her slab of memory wax, knowing, "…I will not trust it, as I do not trust other of my memories." She must revel in the consistencies, the reversals, the reappraisals of what has been said, and what has been done in her name, to her, and in the names of others. The book seeks a sense of singular identity, but also wrestles with the ugly erasure of women in the Christian evangelical patriarchy, and the calculated removal of access to intersectional feminism, which Zimmerman posits, isolates women from each other and from their identities. She admits to being an unreliable narrator of the story unfolding, in frail memory and words limned with ash. "I will say I know & I will say I do not know & I will say my body knows & my fingers know how to hold a man & my heels know how to run & I do not know, flatness of the table under my back & I will say I know, ice cream over the edge, this language & my tongue will not release but my hand still holds the other hand…" Zimmerman writes cryptically, at times, as if in her own code, of a past unhinged, and challenging, violent and without consent. "& I will say to my body that it...