Steffi Tad-y's Notes from the Ward

Reviewed by Amanda Earl

(Gordon Hill Press, 2025)

​These minimalist poems are powerful expressions of vulnerability and intense articulations of dreams. As stated in the author's biography, the poems “often reflect on kinship, diasporic geographies, and formations of the mind.” I find it interesting how these three reflections merge.
 
One of the noteworthy aspects of this collection is its divergence from convention through various techniques, such as unusual contrasts of colour or syntactic play.
 
I am fascinated by Tad-y’s use of colour, which is prevalent throughout the collection, serving as a vivid visual memory but also operating as contrast, this contrast then being mirrored in other aspects of the collection. For example, green bin/caramel popcorn in “The Day I Lost My Job”, or “rainbow scarves & pastel-coloured napkins” in “Postscript to Mania”. “Bits of pink in the cramped winter grey” in the first “Notes from the Ward,” along with “mauve and seafoam socks for my birthday.” Colours that contrast. And in “Spring”: “our walks are in technicolour.”
 
Colour is everywhere, as are the senses, and they often startle me, such as this combination of smell and touch: “A whiff of fir & pine/& the brittle self-forgets”, in “Heads and Tails.” In “Wake,” ahhhhh the sound here: “Leaves lend heft/to the word rustle./Leaves with so much green to give,/trees sounding like the rain.” The poet listens closely and puts this reader into the scene of the poem, the grief of the speaker.
 
Another example of divergence from convention is the placement of two epigraphs after the opening poem. I haven’t seen that done before, and it is a sign that we are entering unique terrain, an unwillingness to follow the status quo, even in the form of the book.
 
“Episode,” the opening poem, is an example of this idea of mine of Tad-y’s use of opposing ideas as it moves from power to powerlessness. The speaker is both god and child. Mother and child. 
 
I’m fascinated by the choice of the two quotations that follow the poem. The first is by Frantz Fanon, a French psychiatrist and critical theorist from Martinque who addressed the issues of the psychiatry of post-colonialism. I think about the treatment of mental health issues of people of colour, of people from the Filipino diaspora: “It is the very basic question of not dragging man in directions which mutilate him, of not imposing on his brain tempos that rapidly obliterate and unhinge it.” In what ways do these impositions apply to the speaker?
 
The second quotation: “I would not have survived if not for the care of others.” Angeli Lacson is a disabled Filipino writer and the author of “Unbecoming,” which unpacks disability through the lenses of class and oppression. I think these two quotes give me a framework to navigate the poems in this collection, work that addresses (mental health) care, culture and understanding of the self.
 
The next poem, “You Who The Earth Was For”, offers the dedication “After Jean Valentine,” an American poet known for the power that comes from the small details in her poems. The poem form here is replicated from Valentine’s “Sanctuary.”
 
I note the commonalities of too-muchness from several other collections published by Gordon Hill Press that address mental health issues, such as Crazy/Mad by AJ Dolman and Disorder by Concetta Principe, or A Bouquet of Glass by Carol Krause, published by Guernica Editions. I note this in dear friends and in myself: are we too much, too intense, too ourselves? In “Spring,” Tad-y writes, “I laughed and even the flowers / thought I was too loud.” And in “Groundhog Day in Blue and Yellow”: 

​Within each slant, something silent screams
and to hear the lullaby, I cupped my hands
over unsevered ears

​“Postscript to Mania” is “After Shira Erlichman,” the author of Odes to Lithium, a book about the author’s issues with mental health that is celebrated for its stylistic upheavals, and I see some stylistic upheavals here in Tad-y’s collection, too. Postscript to Mania is a title taken from the poem of the same name in Odes to Lithium. In this poem, the speaker names herself, “Steffi, see you soon”, and the sometimes real, sometimes thin, sometimes imaginary barrier between the author and speaker, the contract between author and reader to treat the speaker as separate from the author, is removed. I find this relatively often in books that address mental health, and I admire the authors who are willing to breach this border: 

I remember chiffon cake     with the words
             “Steffi, see you soon”       in midnight blue icing           for the stray dog in me,
                                        friend a member of me

I am fascinated by the way the syntax of the “friend a member of me” isn’t easy to parse, and mirrors a state of mania, perhaps. Disorienting. It’s unfair to extract these few lines because of Tad-y’s spareness. Every part of this poem is important in the way it represents her mania and the awareness of paradoxical behaviour in the postscript.
 
The book is named for the twelve-poem suite that runs through the collection. #1 is a list poem with a series of individual, seemingly unrelated but evocative sentences about memory, family, and success, and hints, “Light to prune the overgrowth.” Some form of contrast seems to be a feature of each of the poems in the sequence. In #2: “But M., she told me, She is | She continues/though the past.”
 
I have starred this book all the way through with its gorgeous and emotive imagery, its spare language, its colours, its candour. Dogears too. In my review of Grace Kwan’s The Sacred Heart Motel, on Arc Poetry Magazine’s site, I write about Kwan’s ability to take a literal image and make a connection to an emotion or feeling. I feel like Tad-y does this too, but also that she does it through contrasts and rebellion against the status quo: play with syntax, disorientation in language that mirrors disorientation and opposition of the self.
 
This work is a brave, tender and well-written collection of autobiographical poems about dreams, bipolar disorder, care, family, and heritage. 

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Amanda Earl (she/her) writes, publishes, edits, reviews and mentors fellow writers on the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg Peoples. Her current work-in-progress is “desire, a footnote,” a long poem in six parts about relationship anarchy, radical love and cherished friendships. Amanda and her husband, Charles, intend 2026 to be a year of creative collaborations offered as one-off limited editions of handmade books, hybrid work, and whimsical connections. More information is available at AngelHousePress.Square.Site.
 
Earl is managing editor of Bywords.ca and the editor of Judith: Women Making Visual Poetry. Visit AmandaEarl.com for more info or subscribe to Amanda Thru the Looking Glass for ukulele songs, cost-saving recipe tips, quotes of the week and other trips down the rabbit hole.