Notes from the Ward by Steffi Tad-y

Reviewed by Dawn Macdonald

Not everyone who experiences a psychotic break is capable of maintaining finely observed notes throughout the process, and converting these to lyric. In Notes from the Ward, Steffi Tad-y turns her eye and ear to small daily details that become numinous under her pen. Riding public transit, for example, she sees an elderly woman applying moisturizer to chapped hands, and notes with care the sequence in which she massages between thumb and forefinger, then around the base of each digit in its turn. Tad-y asks herself, “Why must I stare, memorizing every detail—I’ll need them at some point?”

Indeed, she does need the details, as the world depends on their unfolding from moment to moment. (Seeing extreme import in the mundane is, of course, a feature of some varieties of psychotic break, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t so.) There are many beautiful instances of noticing in Tad-y’s poems, such as when she and her wardmate are standing in bright sunlight and one of them makes a spontaneous shadow puppet with a linking of the thumbs: “T sees me questioning // my hands, / how to make it fly. // Trust a bird / if you see one, // even when / it is a shadow.”

Toward the end of the collection, as Tad-y prepares to leave residential treatment, she lies on her bed and discovers, “My blue sweater / & green shorts remind me I am part of this Earth.” She is grounded by her ability to observe objects and their qualities, despite the upward pull of mental flight. “It is clear,” she says, in one of the book’s longer pieces, “how I want // to be saved / by what I can // catch / with my eye.”

Tad-y’s stylistic choices throughout Notes from the Ward speak of thoughtful intention and control. Her favoured form is the single-page lyric broken into short lines arranged in couplets. The abbreviated line corrals thought into tightly contained space. She also makes use of the list poem, as in “Notes from the Ward #1” which has the appearance of a therapist’s assignment to itemize some instances of the positive, like “Mauve and seafoam socks for my birthday,” or simple “Sleep & shelter.” Several pieces in the collection take the form of brief, one-box prose poems running under half a page. These feel diaristic, each focused on a day or an isolated incident. In the first of these, titled “The Day I Lose My Job”, Tad-y tells us nothing about the job or what leads to the ending of it, but instead describes in a few brief sentences the events of a quiet evening: “… The television show I watch ends with a thank you to all who made it possible. The last episode closes with a small ship sailing out of a child’s bedroom. …”

It is only towards the last three-quarters of the book, where the climax might come in a classic novel, that the form of the pieces begins to break apart on the page, leaving chunks of white space that, for all their openness, are cautiously marked off with square brackets. In the final pages, the forms coalesce once again, moving back towards the earlier structures yet now sustaining a little more ease with longer lines and some internal spacing.

Tad-y, who was born and raised in the Philippines, warmly invokes family and lineage within her work. Parents, grandparents and an uncle appear to offer gentle support. Lines translated from Tagalog speak to historical survivals, to enduring resilience. Notes from the Ward offers an inside view of a psychological journey that mostly steers clear of the trauma narrative, choosing instead to share sensitive observation in a spirit of connectedness. In the words of Filipina writer Angeli Lacson, quoted by Tad-y in an epigram early in the book, “I would not have survived if not for the care of others.”

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About the Author

Steffi Tad-y is a disabled artist and writer from Manila. She is the author of From the Shoreline and Notes from the Ward published by Gordon Hill Press. Receiving support from the Canada Council for the Arts and the BC Arts Council, Steffi’s poems often reflect on kinship, diasporic geographies, and formations of the mind. She lives in Toronto.

About the Reviewer

Dawn Macdonald lives in Whitehorse, Yukon, where she grew up without electricity or running water. She won the 2025 Canadian First Book Prize for her poetry collection Northerny. She posts weekly at Reviews of Books I Got for Free or Cheap (on Substack), as well as reviewing for journals and for The Seaboard Review of Books.

Book Details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Gordon Hill Press

• Publication date ‏ : ‎ Sept. 1 2025

• Language ‏ : ‎ English

• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1774221675

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1774221679