the autobiography of flapjack sally

Intrigued? You should be. This new publication from (my friend) Lila Matsumoto has the strongest collection of poems I’ve seen together in a while. None of them are duds!—all the more amazing in a themed publication. The theme of this issue of Scree is “The Outside World,” andIt felt like a missive from The Outside World indeedwhen I received the envelope from Edinburgh, Scotland (where the magazine is based) containing these 18 pages of poems which, the acknowledgements page tells me, were “typed on a typewriter (make unknown) which was bought at Steptoes on East Preston Street, Edinburgh.”

The poems adhered to the theme clearly in their various ways—from intense attempts to describe cloud-motion, gloaming and literal weather, to Heidi Tannenbaum’s affectingly plain-spoken meditation on perception; from a translation from Philoktetes by the under-rated Mabel de Silentio (the wretched), to hilarious prose catalogue of species outside our own from “The Unpublished” Hugo Undershin. Scree’s is an Outside World that engages all the senses (yep, and I’m not even talking about the CD) and draws you inextricably in. 

For more information about the magazine, send a note to screemagazine@googlemail.com or check out the website.