* Longlisted for Pat Lowther Memorial Award 2023
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."
Hear Steffi read on the Poets Corner Reading Series – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYI3mxByNBc.
"Tad-y explores the diasporic experience as it intersects with mental illness through the historical and personal." – Fiona Tinwei Lam for The Tyee
"This collection is as delicate as it is confronting; written with precision while leaving plenty of space for the reader to question and explore the silences... Ultimately, this is a collection about love–of self, family, and culture–and the ways in which we struggle to preserve it in a world that often seeks to seize it." – Haley Down for Blank Spaces
"Steffi Tad-y is one of those poets I have been waiting for. Through her work, language itself transforms, implicated and generous, holding towards breath. From the Shoreline reminds me why I need poetry, why I come back to the altar of a bookshelf, and what—even if I didn't know before—I seek. Tad-y blesses us with the complexity of what nourishes and hurts, always unfolding." – Hari Alluri, author of The Flayed City