Notes from the Ward by Steffi Tad-y
ARC Review
Out: September 1
Publisher: Gordon Hill Press
I don’t usually start a review this way, but I want to thank the author for sharing so much vulnerability in this collection. You shared a part of yourself that not everyone will understand, but those who do will carry it with them. To me this felt like an acknowledgment of the life you are living and of those around you living it with you.
This isn’t a clean story of recovery. What Steffi Tad-y offers in Notes from the Ward instead are pieces of a life: ward notes, family memories, and the weight of diaspora. They do not come together into one neat picture, but they hold each other the way survival often does, loosely and urgently, without choice.
The Notes from the Ward sections read like a journal written to keep steady.
Cheese without flatulence, birthday socks, tracing lines on the hospital floor.
Small, ordinary things, sometimes funny, sometimes sharp, that remind us even inside the ward there is still life collecting in bits and pieces.
What stayed with me most were the poems about family. A father hauling a mattress through the rain. A mother opening Tupperware of fish stew and cake. A grandmother’s prayers carried into the fields. In Mangroves, her father says, “Families can be mangroves too.” This line holds the whole book for me. Kinship as protection, as shelter, as something that bends but doesn’t break.
The diasporic voice runs strong here, layered into the illness. In Noli Me Tangere, Tad-y writes, “I will say amen to every brown bridge, brown vessel, brown river, brown house, brown land… that birthed and continues to birth my brown, brown life possible.” There is no softening of heritage. It is claimed fully, insistently, in the middle of everything else.
This book is not easy. It doesn’t offer closure or cure. The reader is left with the mania, something not easily understood by those that don’t live with it. This illness is not something that ends but something lived with. There is tenderness in these poems:
family, food, music, karaoke, fried chicken, even Bee Gees on repeat.
All reminders of the roots that still hold.
Would I recommend it? Yes. I would recommend it to readers who want poetry that doesn’t shy away from mental health, and to those who want to see how diaspora, memory, and family thread through that struggle. It will stay with you because of the fragments it gathers and the truth that with this illness there are no neat answers.
Thank you to the Steffi Tad-y , Gordon Hill Press, and River Street Writing for the ARC.
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