Notes from the Ward is Steffi Tad-y's new collection of poetry exploring bipolar disorder and psychotic break through lived experience and a poet's eye. It is breathtakingly truthful and disarmingly direct, a powerful intervention into a diagnosis that remains more medicalized and sensationalized than understood.

Steffi Tad-y's debut collection brings forward diasporic experience as it intersects with mental illness. Family history and work lyrics occur against a tonal backdrop of the carceral. Yet Tad-y brings a tenderness to these fraught circumstances, finding beauty in detail and repetitive acts of love, in part due to the use of a multiplicity of forms that render a surplus of affect into beautiful images. Though danger properly exists in Tad-y's world, her poetry takes its own advice in "Writer's Archive": "Look. Enough. Each full stop unspooling / the cardinal & bluebird privacy of things."