Steffi Tad-y's ​Notes from the Ward

Reviewed by Kathryn MacDonald

(Gordon Hill Press, 2025)

​Notes from the Ward is Steffi Tad-y’s second full collection of poetry. It follows From the Shoreline and Merienda, which was nominated for the 2021 bpNichol Chapbook Award. Tad-y’s “themes of kinship, diasporic geographies, and formations of the mind” continue in her new collection.
 
Steffi Tad-y makes poems out of the world she knows: the bipolar world of the title’s Ward. From the prologue poem, you will slip into Tad-y’s rhythm and her spell, her taut, compressed poems, the white space that works for her, and the way the poems resonate with each other, and you will lose yourself in Tad-y’s words, her craft. Accessibility and depth enrich these poems, a sign of a skilled poet.
 
The collection begins with the prologue poem, which introduces us to voice and form:

​Episode
 
Illness, unpinnable.
In my head, I was mother
 
to a god,
god to a mother.
 
Body belonging to men.
The doctor reported
 
distorted, disheveled.
Desire taken to extremes.

​We meet her mother, her father. She is offered

​…fish stew & cake.
In an instant, I am
 
the days I covet,
the child in my dreams.

​From the personal of “Episode,” she shifts to addresses the reader in “You Who The Earth Was For,” or is she speaking to the younger self she has just introduced? Here we witness one of the tensions within and between the poems. It holds me like a magnet.
 
The first poem following the epigraph, expands on the ideas expressed in the prologue poem, and provides readers with more insight into what lies beneath the surface of the poetry:

​You Who The Earth Was For
After Jean Valentine
 
You fleeing war, carrying a rooster with your shaky hand.
You trained to pummel, never the first to wince or flinch.
 
You who plant their sadness into dirt.
You whose questions have no gentle answers.
 
You who cook too close to the stove.
You at the table, missing the one.
 
You whose loss comes with wordlessness.
You beside the rubble, out to build again.
 
You in the backseat being loved.
You running towards water.

Knowing something of American poet Jean Valentine offers a clue to understanding Tad-y’s work. According to the Poetry Foundation website, Valentine’s “lyric poems delve into dream lives with glimpses of the personal and political.’ …David Kalstone said of her work, ‘Valentine has a gift for tough strangeness, but also a dreamlike syntax and manner of arranging the lines of...short poems so as to draw us into the doubleness and fluency of feelings.’ Adrienne Rich wrote of Valentine’s work, ‘This is a poetry of the highest order, because it lets us into spaces and meanings we couldn't approach in any other way.’” Something of the same can be said of Tad-y’s poetry, which is also political (i.e. mental health/the ward) and personal (kinship, diaspora). This high praise is deserved.
 
The collection includes twelve numbered poems that are sprinkled throughout the book; each is a numbered “Notes from the Ward.” #1 is a list poem—each stanza a single sentence, observations, setting. The second is disorienting, disconcerting. The third is “After Ocean Vuong’s ‘Reasons for Staying’” and lists memories and “Seconds of optimism.”
 
In “Notes from the Ward #4,” Tad-y takes us inside what happens when “all closing / of myself falls” away. But… 

​T sees me questioning
 
my hands,
how to make it fly.
 
Trust a bird
if you see one,
 
even when
it is a shadow.

The “Notes…” are jarring, troubling, haunting, and crafted to say as much between the lines as the words themselves express. We slip inside experience. It is disconcerting.
 
In “Notes from the Ward #10,” the poem is dedicated to Aracelis Girmay, a poet who traces connections between transformation and loss (Poetry Foundation, web). As with the previous noted homage, knowing something about the poet cited gives readers insight into Tad-y’s poems. She wants to be understood:

​Notes from the Ward #10
For Aracelis Girmay
 
Remembering love
I’m no longer with,
 
I turn to the música
of a poet who over
 
the years has carried
water for a wound,
 
my wound,
…
 
How she teaches me to
lift my sorrow out of sorrow.
 
despite the hard
& violent streaks
 
found in my hands.

​In #11, Tad-y changes form, with large white spaces between square brackets, leaving much unsaid. But the blank spaces speak. In the final “Notes…” the past is personified as, “She pulls a chair towards where I am. I look for stamina not to fragment.” It is this next bit that explodes: 

I practice my apologies. Write them on my notebook:
 
            I’m sorry
                        I was out of line
                        I snapped
                        I should’ve stopped

​We’ve come to the end of “Notes from the Ward #12.” You may read it differently, but to me, these words shatter. But she does not leave us here. The final two poems synthesize Tad-y’s vision and her themes of kinship, diaspora, and mental illness.
 
In “Proposition,” she writes: “When my grandmother reads the news that volcanoes, / Mayon & Taal, were threatening to blow, // I tried not to make the comparison, / shun the easy link to my mind yet there I was.”
 
The collection concludes with “Hold On.” It is a vital, yet simple list, a subtle reflection on what we have read, a summation:

​Hold On
 
Everyone has something.
 
This is yours.
 
The trees & their rings are with you.
 
The blade that in time
 
turned into a flock of birds.
 
[…]
 
Roots are everywhere.
 
Naming what we love.
 
Meeting our breath.
 
Song greening song.

I began this review by saying, “From the prologue poem, you will slip into Tad-y’s rhythm and her spell, her taut, compressed poems….” This review has taken me longer than usual to write. I read and put the book down. I began again, and again, and again. Finally, I am content. I can recommend Notes from the Ward without reservation. Staffi Tad-y is a poet to watch. She has something relevant to say and the skill to say it.

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Kathryn MacDonald’s poems have appeared in literary magazines and anthologies in Canada, the U.S., the U.K., Ireland and India. Her reviews have also been published in journals across Canada and on her website (https://kathrynmacdonald.com). Her newest poetry collection, The Blue Gate, will be published by Frontenac Press, Spring 2026. She is a co-author of Liminal Spaces (Glentula Press, 2025) and is the author of Far Side of the Shadow Moon (Glentula Press, 2024), A Breeze You Whisper: Poems (HBP, 2011), and Calla & Édourd (fiction, HBP, 2009).