Problem Child

by Alex Osman

Loosely interconnected fragments and elaborate showpieces form the twisting, jerking topology of Problem Child. Alex Osman’s living art casts wide nets and catches the rain, a mildly dystopian patchwork of monologues, slogans, proverbs and micronarratives bizarre, enchanting, preposterous and beautiful, a deeply sense-invasive concoction of prosody, cacophony and lilts, tape hiss and lens flare, feedback so nothing will ever be forgotten or diminished in grandeur or idiosyncrasy. It encapsulates the energy of art terrorism and mischief like it’s 1999, a terminal USA intoxicating and celebratory. Osman’s lines are hard enough to grind on, myths erupting like flames from the combustible dye of the extra-ordinary, the woolly, the impaired, the divinely anointed creations of primordial America as greasy frying pan. Cracked doesn’t cut it, madcap could be mad-hatter, blotter could help you unlock this medley of suicides, orphans, savants, wretches to flypaper. Scoreboards and staff notes, compositions of manic, maddening intricacy and disarming detours. Problem Child riffs on a thousand-year-old barren society’s intrinsic comedy, a sustained orgasm of the soul. Rug-pull after sidestep, it teeters on the verge of collapse, pirouettes 360 degrees on a unicycle around an anarcho-cosmic world alive with earthy alchemy.

140 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2020

Reviews

[Gwen Hilton]

Alex chronicles the tightrope walk of precarious youth, marginalization due to mental health, poverty, or any and all afflictions, as well as the love and community that can be present in all interactions. He looks to the past and into the lives of others with a fondness that accounts for risk and bathes in the thrill that comes with it. I have only captured fragments of the text here. Problem Child must be experienced to be understood.

Talking about Problem Child is fun as well. Trying to describe a piece to someone else who has read it can have you reaching for phrases and ideas that feel like mad libs. Alex has a unique voice. He brings a greater empathy and understanding to punk scenes that would suffer in less careful hands.

[Ted Prokash]

This was a good one, this Problem Child book. I can't say much about the quality of the writing as I am not a critic and read most of it while drunk in Memphis, TN. Probably scared out of my wits that some native of Memphis would catch me reading a book, which I'm pretty sure they still hang people for down there.

Mostly I enjoy when a writer will write plainly and openly about being mean-spirited, degenerate, and engaging in hateful, destructive, anti-social behaviors. Makes me feel at home. Or maybe the book wasn't like that at all. Like I say, I was mostly drunk.

[Patch]

Swimming in lukewarm water. Gummo but colder. I loved it, but I think this is a rare case of a book I shouldn't revisit. I liked the format of having a short story, followed by several poems. I was at a museum recently that had a room arranged salon style, where pieces are put next to eachother to force a connection. This felt like the opposite, like the rigidity of the structure suggested faux connections but finding the pattern caused dissociation. After I finished reading and was thinking about it I kept getting a mental image of a creature that surrounds itsself with a hard shell to protect its soft insides. It let's them out one day, and everyone is disgusted, and the disgust makes it's shell stronger. So it grows insides on its outsides to generate disgust to create another shell. And it goes on infinitely, shell, guts, shell, guts, shell, guts, shell, guts

[Erik]

Poetry and short stories that combine to make up one of the most entertaining books I’ve read in the past few years. A truly one of a kind document of childhood and growing up that will make you appreciate the wild times of the early 2000s.

[Kyle Kirshbom]

Didn’t read. I’m sure it’s good. Maybe. Didn’t read it so I wouldn’t know