Description
“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, international bestselling poet
“She dishes the dirt, and she’s not afraid of anything. Her writing is coming for you, so you’d better just accept it…Energetic and irreverent, a must read.” – Overland Literary Journal
“The kind of honesty that can only come about after being wound-up, held writhing, repressed and silenced”
– Disclaimer Magazine (UK)
“With this second collection of poetry, Koraly’s writing gets better and better. There is the same punch and passion of her first collection, yet there is also wonderful moments of quiet and regret. In this long form narrative poem cycle, we see the emergence of a soul out of shame, bitterness and terror into defiance, resolution and strength. It’s absolutely authentic and absolutely dynamic.”
– Christos Tsiolkas, award-winning author
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. It is a story of repression. It is a story of being silenced, and the terror of 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 is a story of liberation, of rebuilding and finding one’s true self.
“In her candour and her urgency, Koraly captures the painful, the shameful, the messy in all of us. Koraly’s voice is unique, impassioned and grunts and shouts and howls and whispers and cajoles and offers on every page of this book. Just give me the pills is an odyssey. A female, Greek-Cypriot-Australian odyssey about being, becoming, about motherhood and marriage, about self-hatred and self-love. It is both intensely personal and broadly universal. It is a guide to self-realisation. A call to arms.”
– Emilie Collyer, award-winning playwright
“As an Australian of Greek heritage, I know how there can be a culture of silence around taboo subjects within our community. Sometimes this silence is necessary, to protect us from the wider community’s insults and bigotry, but at other times it is violently imposed on the younger generations to restrict us from breaking out of archaic cultural norms. This kind of silence often feeds into a cycle of past traumas borne out of experiences of war and migration. I’ve always seen Koraly Dimitriades as, above all, a viciously fearless poet – and her new collection, ‘Just Give Me The Pills’ is no exception. For Koraly, a second-generation Cypriot-Australian woman, to openly navigate mental health, sexism, marriage, expectation and motherhood in such a vulnerable and clear way is a priceless moment for Australian writing. It makes me proud not just as a writer to know her, but also as a member of a community that desperately needs more vehemently honest voices like hers”
– Luka Lesson, Australian poetry slam champion
“Just Give Me the Pills is an extraordinary composition – a defiant portrait of untamed domesticity that is at once tender and fierce. This verse narrative traces the intimate triumphs and falls on one woman’s journey from repression to self-realisation and silence to words, writing the domestic and inner space with a brutal honesty that is candid, unashamed and shockingly moving. Dimitriadis urgently speaks her truth in a voice that is brave, daring and uncensored – exposing herself entirely in an extremity of vulnerability and strength. A feminist anthem for social justice and self-love, Just Give Me the Pills teems with sexuality and bristles with rage – a riveting and compulsive read.”– Bronwyn Lovell, Val Vallis award winner
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