I have a theory about outspoken women. They are accused of being disruptive, confronting, provocative and too direct. They highlight uncomfortable truths and demand change, and they are people-displeasers. There’s a Greek word for a loud, squawking bird, which is wonderfully onomatopoeic: a karakaksa. And this is what angry women, articulate women, expressive women, are often called. According to patriarchal pundits, they don’t ‘articulate’; they ‘screech’. Like those harpies in Greek mythology.
But if we look a little deeper, we find that those harpies are ultimately conveyors of karmic justice. And underneath their fearsome visages is a sincerity that is very much needed in this world, a flashing blade that cuts through many of the hypocrisies human beings accustom themselves to living with.
There is rage in this collection, both personal and political. Anger and frustration at the suppressive forces operating on immigrants, on women, on women wanting equity and accountability in their personal relationships, on women navigating relationships with their families of origin, and individuating in enmeshed systems in which they grow up, and in which they are often the outsider, and seen as a kind of dangerous force, or a freak.
The poems in That’s What They Do are ideally suited for performance, and I am sure the poet would be in her element in front of an open mic. A conservative or classicist poetic tradition might not categorise many of the poems as poems, but as outbursts, rants or streams of consciousness, or the uneasy half of a dialogue with a reluctant and withdrawn partner. The poems are like lances thrown across a battlefield – they are combative, and confronting, and their explosive tone seems on first encounter to preclude the possibility of any discovery of common ground.
Yet the overall energy of these poetic outbursts is exuberant, powerful, and positive. The collection segues from interpersonal relationship poems to sociopolitical protest poems and memoir poems, on an arc from fierceness to gentleness. The gentler and more illuminating reflective poems introduce a welcome tenderness and subtlety of emotional range. There is polarization, but there is also duality, and there is the possibility of dialogue – if the challenge is met by someone courageous enough to enter the fray.
The fraught dialogue poems between lovers shows an articulate woman in contention with an inarticulate man who has disappointed her, laden as he is with unprocessed emotional baggage, expecting his partner to do the emotional labour inherent in any partnership, which should be shared. In ‘Timid’, the man will not acknowledge the persona as his partner, speaking ‘contemptuously’ to her while she tells him that she is seeking to ‘acknowledge the complex brilliance that you are’. Love is affirmative, but her partner denies her this positive reinforcement: ‘I’m not your boyfriend’, he spits contemptuously on the phone. This paradox shows misalignment: not just temporal, but structural. Attempting to understand the reason for their fractured connection, she asks him a series of direct questions:
Do you really hate women?
Or is that your dead violent father
whispering in your ear?
Is that him speaking out of your mouth?
But these questions are asked after they have broken up, and they are questions he should have been asking himself. The unreliability of the narrator, and the disconnect between her wishes and what she experiences in the chaotic interpersonal dynamics unsettles us. We see her reaching out for connection, asking for clarification but receiving repudiation:
I don’t recognise my boyfriend anymore
I don’t know where he’s gone
I can feel your hate for me hissing through my veins,
the anger you have at the world
and what happened to you
crashing down on me
I think I’m your closest person.
The typographical isolation here evokes the emotional isolation felt in a non-aligned connection; no amount of discussion can bridge that gap. And the structural positioning of the standalone line is perfectly ironic: at the moment of this utterance, the persona is furthest away from the object of her affection.
I try to support you across our divide
This painful expanse
Because I have a vision in my mind…
I draw on the strength you fell in love with
Allow time’s cards, to reveal themselves to me.
Dimitriadis uses the cumulative unfolding of the stream of consciousness to build awareness and emerge into clarity in the end focus of the poem.
In ‘That’s What They Do’, the persona is intimately aware of the dynamics of interpersonal conflict, how fraught and distraught individuals
Blame you for their actions
Punish you for them
Lie
Twist
Distort
Subtly deny
So you’re not sure
If it’s them or you
And you think you’re going mad, and it’s all your fault,
and you’re so depleted you can’t think straight don’t
recognise yourself have no idea how you ended up here
or what happened to the person you used to be…
The realisations here unfold like an accordion, step by step and then in sequence, gathering intensity and momentum. The persona has understood the pattern:
Because that’s what they do
To create instability
And gain control over you
Just like what happened to them too.
The acting out of cycles and loops in toxic attachments derive from unprocessed emotion. Peace is not made. Closure is not attained. The raucousness is part of the repetitive process which has not yet been internalised, and ricochets and aggrandizes.
The compulsive need for attachment underlying the tone of ‘If I Leave Him Alone For Long Enough’ paints a vivid portrait of interpersonal emotional abuse. The persona seeks through the confessional third person style to reach a point where she can issue a Public Service Announcement, warning the next person about this dysfunctional individual.
If I leave him alone for long enough
He will go and abuse someone else
And then, I’ll be completely free of him
He will have another victim to play with
And I won’t have to feel his inflicted pain anymore
I know, I shouldn’t be wishing him onto someone else
It’s an awful thing to do
But he will do it, he can’t help it
And that person will have to learn too
That if they leave him alone, he will go someplace else
I feel for the next woman, the next and the next
But all I can do is write this poem, to help them see quickly.
A significant shift in tone in the collection occurs when we move from personal disillusionment to a more objective examination of the hollowness of celebrity culture and expedient politics, and the misogyny and social inequity with which public spheres are riddled: ‘It’s true crime unravelling in real time,’ she comments in ‘The End Of Hollywood’.
The social divisions and the economic divides are further amplified by gendered power imbalances. Dimitriadis does a laser focus X-ray profile of the exposure of Jeffrey Epstein in ‘He Liked The Barely Legal Type’. A snapshot summary works well here: ‘a barely legal child is a growing child’ is a powerful premise, scathing in its resonance of the legal definition of a baby, which is one of the points of conflict in the arguments for/against legalizing abortion. At what point does a foetus become a human being? At what point does a child become recognized as an adult? Or, to a predator, a person that can be preyed upon? These interrogations bristle beneath the surface of the words. The consent of an adult is worth receiving. But the children ‘didn’t have the wisdom of an adult/ To know they could say no.’
The memoir poems are often reflective of the deep feelings the poet has for her matriarchal family. In ‘Cherry Flan’, the poet remembers not only a delicious childhood treat handmade by her aunt in Cyprus but juxtaposes this with the grief and anguish she felt when she was unable to intervene to save her aunt from the suffering of an illness which could have been remedied by medication that was not available to her in time. Her use of the Greek term Thia makes this not just an iteration but an evocation, a summoning through memory and imagination. Her aunt’s generosity and nurturing attitude unfolds from line to line and detail to detail:
…and when she cuts it
with her olive-skinned hand,
passes you a piece on an antique porcelain plate
with her gentle hand, her giving grin
you sigh, snuggle on her sofa and think
I’m home.
I’m home.
She’s home.
My Thia is home.
The structure of this poem balances the warmth of the stability in the first part against the cold impersonal indifference of the pharmaceutical company in the second. All the harsh consonant sounds and the thin-lipped truncated vowel sounds indicate the undervaluing of what the poet loves and treasures:
There was a cabinet
In a drug company’s closet
That could have saved her life
But they were trying to figure out the cost
Who owned the patent rights
Who would distribute
The shareholders and the shit
The cash and the corporate…
These corporations abandon their duty of care, the poet says. The lady whom they victimize with their apathy dies before her time, amidst the very acts of nurturing which define her.
These are women-centred poems. But Dimitriadis recognises that a sense of universal sisterhood is not extended to all. The viciousness to which women can descend in their dealings with each other is powerfully evoked in ‘I’ll Stare You Down, Bitch’. The voice of the persona is a mother’s voice, defending her son who is accused of harassment. She asks the accuser if she is the only woman who’s ever endured this, and reminds her he could have done much worse. This is internalised misogyny taken to previously unseen levels: challenging the victim’s story and blaming her for faking and amplifying her suffering. First person voice magnetises this exchange, which is yet another half of a dialogue where the person addressed is silent.
Dimitriadis also recognises that women as a gender have shared experiences of injustice and abuse across differing cultures. A barrage of rhetorical questions highlights her impatience for necessary social change. In ‘Every Day Another Woman’, she asks:
Is my daughter not safe at school,
or even in her workplace?
Walking the streets, in our own homes,
these men do not discriminate
When did they decide they could take our bodies without permission?
When did they decide they had the right?
To take away our freedom, to rob us of our light?
As a woman writer who wants to openly address these injustices, Dimitriadis finds herself at odds with just about everyone in the literary community, which she depicts as a bunch of back-slapping, self-satisfied gatekeepers. She expresses the power imbalance between writers and publishers as a form of consensual torture, using religious imagery to underline the cultural embeddedness of the obeisance into which the writer is forced. In ‘Wog Woman Writer (What It’s Like)’, she immerses us in this chronic tension:
Sometimes I consider presenting myself
to the nearest publishing house,
palms pressed together as if in prayer
and asking if they please wouldn’t mind
stitching my hands shut so I can neither write nor type
(I will provide the needle and thread).
The direct, in medias res openings serve Dimitradis well, personalizing her political stance effectively, as in ‘HR In The Arts’:
If someone were to measure my
job satisfaction right now,
it would be zero.
Her oppositional and contrarian stance is deeply felt across several spheres of her life simultaneously. She ironically describes herself via socially imposed cultural labels as a ‘Greek Diasporic Second-Gen Black Sheep’, effectively showing how racism and conformism conflate and conspire and intersect to enrage her.
Oh, what I wouldn’t give to extract
this Greekness from my body,
for my body to heal,
for my mind to rest from this judgemental chatter
What I wouldn’t give to resist this masochistic behaviour
This curse, this curse of who I am.
Is healing possible, in such a contentious creative realm? And is choosing violence because she has ‘unconventional thoughts’ likely to result in self-reflection and self-reconciliation? Or in yet more aggravation? The speaker has sought diagnosis and remedies for her hyper-aroused, vigilante-style condition: in ‘My Complex PTSD’, she comments on the powerless status of single mums, and those who are not protected by the cushioning available to ‘the entitled ones’.
Part of discerning one’s own identity is the process of disentangling it from the enmeshments of sociocultural forces, the pulses of romantic and sexual relationships, and the power dynamics of intergenerational assumptions and impositions. The memoir poem ‘My Father Is A Poet’ uses a prose-poem anecdotal format to tell the story of this primary relationship. The more measured unfolding of thought of this style suits the profound realisations which emerge:
I was infuriated by his attempts to continue his control of my life. I felt guilt and shame for so many years…
Now it’s all making sense, why the poetry exploded out of me like a volcano, generations of silenced war and colonisation, repressed stories and poetry, flowing from me like lava.
The final sentence is a perfect counterpoint, both thematically and thermally, to the fiery, intense story that precedes it:
My parents sit in their house in cold Australia, aching for home… lifetimes away, they never really go anywhere, except, every so often they go to Cyprus, to have the Cypriots look at them with starry eyes, when they mention they live in Australia.
The challenge for a responsive writer is finding one’s authentic source, a challenge which is especially important in the midst of cultural and global disruption, as illustrated in ‘This Pandemic Reminds Me Of’, where we are invited to visit, via the poet’s memory, Kambos, ‘a remote, mountain village in Cyprus’.
Far away from these nostalgic spaces, in the fray of battle, the poet is so used to being critiqued that she mirrors it back as a defiant reflex, in a series of staccato-style rhetorical questions, as in ‘She’s Too Intense’. There’s a peacock-like display, a flurry of performative projection, a series of dismissive and reductionist third person blasts, and the ending settles into a realisation which creates clarity. Anger is unattractive; ‘She’s gonna remain single forever.’
The most impactful insight is also the shortest:
It was her jealousy that ate the fat
from my bones so only skin
and bones remained.
The poet’s tense altercations have produced wisdom, however, which she shares like a contemporary Oracle in ‘The Theory Of Relative Jealousy’: ‘Jealous people flock together/ Whisper honey-soaked lies/ to make each other feel better.’ Part of living life is discerning between who is friend and who is faux. The world is divided into Haves and Have Nots. It is not what we want, or would prefer, but it is what it is:
It’s as natural as the theory of gravity
It’s the theory, of relative jealousy.
Dimitriadis’s poetic voice is more than a call to action in an external sense. It’s not only telling other people where to go, but the act of finding within oneself not just a home but a compass, and progressing on the pathway of one’s unique life, undisrupted and underailed by the misunderstandings and interferences of others. Knowing that ‘people cling to you to suck you/ for everything you can give’, it is best to be aware of the agenda of others, both when taking and giving. And that includes the taking of unsolicited advice!
As Dimitriadis says herself, in the witty and rhythmic transposition of the classic Mariah Carey popular festive season song ‘All I Want For Xmas Is For People To Stop Telling Me What To Do’, her work is combative and confronting – but she knocks you down to lift you up.
That’s What They Do
by Koraly Dimitriadis
Outside The Box Press, 2025
$27.95
Devika Brendon is an academic, teacher, reviewer and editor of English Literature, as well as a creative writer of poetry and prose. She was consultant editor for FemAsia Magazine, and a poetry editor with Girls On Key, and is currently content editor for the New Ceylon Writing Literary Journal, and executive editor of Glitterati Quill Magazine. Her work has been widely published in anthologies and journals, both in print and online.
Devika is also a journalist, whose opinion pieces and articles have been published in The Sunday Times, The Daily Mirror, Groundviews, Ceylon Today, The Morning, and The Sun. Her first novel, Aversion, set in contemporary Sri Lanka, has recently been published by Jam Fruit Tree Publications.