She’s Not Normal by Koraly Dimitriadis
Koraly Dimitriadis’ She’s Not Normal (2024) is a powerful, raw and deeply personal poetry collection that refuses to be anything but itself. Through an intensely autobiographical lens, Dimitriadis explores the intersections of womanhood, class, motherhood and migration with fierce and unapologetic feeling. Comprised of poems written over a twelve-year period, She’s Not Normal rails against tidy categories that society uses to box women in.
Dimitriadis, of Cypriot descent, grapples with the social and cultural expectations placed on her throughout her life. She says, “After living a life prescribed by my working-class, migrant culture, I exploded out in poetry. Today, as a divorced single mother, I have made it my mission to connect with others who have experienced what it’s like to be ostracised, misunderstood, silenced or repressed by culture, religion or society.” Her work speaks to the suffocating nature of patriarchal structures, particularly within migrant communities. The title poem ‘She’s Not Normal’ consists of a cacophony of voices questioning, accusing and demanding to know why she cannot conform.
“Why isn’t she normal?
Why can’t she be normal?
Why can’t she say normal things?
She’s not normal
Why can’t she be normal?”
Here, you can tell right away that Dimitriadis is a performance poet. With the repetition and rhythm of the language, it is easy to imagine these words being shouted from a stage, or even through a megaphone. This performative quality is what gives her poetry its power.
What’s also clear from the outset is that her work is not concerned with palatability or traditional literary conventions. The book is published by Outside The Box Press, and poems such as ‘I write my poems on the fly’ directly confront the literary establishment that continues to overlook voices like hers. She exposes the systemic barriers preventing working-class, migrant women from being fully recognised in Australia’s literary scene:
“I’m not some white middle-class guy
who has been educated in literature,
who has been awarded a grant to sit and write
20 to 50 poems
over the space of one year
& work on his craft
& refine and make it perfect.
I'm a divorced single mum
from a working-class sexist, patriarchal background
where stomping and looking down on women
is very much quite normal.”
Dimitriadis tellingly dedicates the collection to the late Ania Walwicz, a Polish-Australian writer, performer and artist whose bold, subversive style was often dismissed as “bad taste.” She preferred the experimental, the ugly and the unconventional, and she wrote scathingly about her difficult experience as a migrant to Australia (“the big ugly”). Walwicz reflected on this in a 1982 interview with Going Down Swinging: “Perhaps this relates to the fact that I come from a different culture where the act of revealing oneself, emotional behaviour, is more accepted than in Anglo-Saxon culture.” Dimitriadis certainly shares this same openness and defiance of convention.
Her first collection from 2011 was titled Love and Fuck Poems and this sense of humour and frankness on the topic of relationships, love and sex is apparent in this collection as well, with poems like ‘Fuck V Day’, ‘My boyfriend broke my heart at the dinner table’, ‘Starfish 69’ and ‘Casual Sex’.
Many of the poems function as a kind of time capsule, capturing key moments in Australia’s political history, particularly in relation to gendered violence and feminism. Thank you, feminist Gillard (2012) critiques the contradiction of Julia Gillard, Australia’s first female Prime Minister, being celebrated for her famous anti-misogyny speech, while on the same day implementing policies that disadvantaged single mothers. Smile (For Grace Tame) is a sharp, cutting piece inspired by activist Grace Tame refusing to smile in a photo with then-Prime Minister Scott Morrison – a moment that exposed the country’s discomfort with women who refuse to perform niceness.
“Don’t cha really want to, babe?
You know you do
Come on, show us your teeth
You’re so pretty, babe
Show it off, strut your stuff
Smile, come on, babe, come on
It’ll really help us all feel better”
It is Dimitriadis’ poems about gendered violence that I found the most powerful and resonant. The poems Aiia’s poem (2019), Missing in Brunswick (Part III) (For Jill Meagher, 2012), and A fucking arsehole-of-a-man killed his wife (For Hannah Clarke) rage against the epidemic of male violence in Australia as well as the way it is reported in the media, while also mourning the women we’ve lost. Here, the grief and fury pours out:
“A fucking arsehole psycho-piece-of-shit killed his wife
He was nothing but a monster
she was trying to get away from
Who believes a woman anyway, until it’s too late”
For those who mostly read literary fiction, like myself, the simplicity and repetition in Dimitriadis’ writing, so effective in performance, can often feel overdone on the page. Many poems follow somewhat predictable trajectories, and the confessional can drift into navel-gazing. The message is always delivered at brute force. But, of course, subtlety is not really the point: this is poetry as protest, as catharsis, as survival. Dimitriadis says that her aim for the collection was “to empower others, to help them feel less alone, to help them see that they have choices, because I did not have this and it was very, very hard.”
She’s Not Normal is unpolished, unpretentious and unrelenting – and it certainly got me reading outside the box.
Emily Riches is a writer and editor from Mullumbimby, currently living on Gadigal land (Sydney). She founded Aniko Press to bring passionate writers and curious readers together, discover new voices and create a space for creative community. You can get in touch at emily@anikopress.com.