Just Give Me The Pills

***Winner best book Poetry (narrative) American Book Fest 2024.

In a large, white-picket dream, a married mother selfishly cries. She has everything she ever wanted – a husband, a house, a business degree, a baby – she is at the pinnacle of the migrant dream. Perhaps she needs to return to her medication, the pills she stopped taking to become pregnant. She was taking them for six years. She wasn’t allowed to move out of home so she married at twenty-two. Now she is thirty, and it’s as if she is looking at her life for the very first time. She is starting to see things. The creativity she had kept buried inside all her life birthed out with her daughter, and now her words are taking on a life of their own. From the author of the Australian poetry bestseller, Love and F--k Poems, Just Give Me The Pills is yet another brilliant novel-in-verse by Koraly Dimitriadis, and this special illustrated edition includes drawings by Koraly’s daughter. Exploring the challenges of leaving a marriage, divorce, co-parenting, single motherhood, Just Give Me The Pills is a story told through poetry of a woman’s liberation from the chains of migrant culture and repression, and the terror or realising all the choices you’ve ever made are those you were expected to make, and you have no idea who you really are. It’s a story of being silenced, of reclaiming your voice, rebuilding, and finding one’s true self. "I am so obsessed with Koraly. Her work is disarming, emotionally fearless and she sounds like nobody else alive. I will read her poetry forever." — Hera Lindsay Bird, bestselling poet, Pamper Me To Hell And Back.

"Koraly Dimitriadis is a poet of the finest balance. She writes with the tenderness of a loving hand and a fist that smashes oppression," Tony Birch, bestselling author, White Girl, and Boisbouvier Chair in Australian Literature.