by Skylar Kay
Frontenac House (2026)
“We’ve always been here / monsters, queer-coded villains / performing the transgressive act / of living.”
These poems take us on journeys from Calgary to Windsor, inward and outward, from joy to sorrow, evoking visceral empathy along the way. Your blood boils as you read “How to be One of the Good Ones” as she writes of a neighbour finding out she’s trans and saying “Oh, well you’re one of the good ones.” The poem continues with instructions on how to be “one of the good ones”, with a clever and biting list of what not to do:
“Definitely don’t pour gasoline on their front line / spill-spell SHE/THEY / in PetroleumBold capital letters / and don’t strike the match.”
The searing image left behind from that unstruck match has never left my mind, nor have the hypothetical pink, blue, or white hydrangeas planted in the bed of such a neighbour (“with permission, of course”). The musicality and rhythm of her verse come through in this piece too, when she writes,
“Don’t speak the spells / dripping truth from lip— / sweet then spicy drip drip drip.”
Kay is not bound to form, and her poems rarely rhyme, but when they do, it’s as melodic as an earworm. From a modern sonnet to braille to an answer from a magic eight ball to a concise blackout poem, Kay plays with form like she invented it. And she may very well have with the way she plays with cascading footnotes in “Mirror, Mirror … Or Maybe Overthinking … I Don’t Know Yet”. Here, the would-be simple phrase “I am a woman” is dissected and pulled apart at the seams to challenge and discuss terminology, feminist theory, beauty standards, and what it means to be transgender in today’s world.
At the halfway mark, in “Monsterology 101: the Anatomy of Monsters” she asks, “Did you really expect rage to be harmonious?”
Because yes, there is rage here, but it’s not blind. It’s the all-seeing useful kind we need in the tank in order to show up to the fight. I see There’s Magic Here Too as the shadow self to Kay’s first collection. Where Transcribing Moonlight is soft, gentle, and melancholy, There’s Magic Here Too is raucous, funny, and, not hard, exactly, but punchy. Deftly weaving together monsters and myths and pop culture, moulding it all to enhance and tell of her identity journey, leading the reader not only to meaning, but a riotous, raucous enjoyment that gets you fired up for the cause. This is a riot grrrl album and I am the middle of the mosh pit. Let’s fucking go.
Because this is the “trans agenda” – fighting for the right to exist. It takes courage to just be a trans person in these phobic times, and yet, Skylar Kay not only exists, she uses her experience as a rally cry for change. She’s creating, contributing, even setting the tone of the conversation: one of humour and compassion, resistance and criticism. The monsters she animates, the centaurs and werewolves, the witches and faeries, are vessels of reflection, little pools waiting to be rippled.
People so often deem our differences as monstrous, when of course, monsters are magical. And as Kay writes in “Now You See Me”, “magic turns to truth into the dark.” So, let’s turn off the lights and let this untamed, unabashed queer magic show us the way. Because this book teaches us that magic, if we let it, can dispel the fears of otherness and unite us in the beautiful, diverse, unique tapestry of what it means to be human.
So, if you’ve ever felt like an outsider, if you’ve ever wondered, “Is there any magic left for us?” like the eight ball answers in “Corner Store Oracle”: “The choice is yours.”
Ashley J.J. White has been writing since she was a little girl. She spent her twenties planning and promoting rock concerts. She now works as Program Coordinator for the Writers’ Guild of Alberta, based in Calgary. She has always been a champion of the arts and a cheerleader of independent art. She is currently working on her debut novel, Elizabeth Who?