Problem Child Review

Nothing in life is perfect. You must take the good with the bad, and in Problem Child you must take the good with the forgettable. Some of the works in the literary magazine are undeniably top-notch; like most amateur literary magazines, however, these gems share company with works that don’t quite compare.

Starting off strong, the magazine opens with “Sicily,” a prose poem that splits all the differences between Cuba and Sicily into cigars and pizza – and, amazingly, succeeds. Two complex cultures broken down into common household items. “Sicily” evokes simple pleasures, creating images of Sicilian pizza and Cuban cigars so real I could almost smell the bread rising and taste the ashes on my tongue. Unfortunately, the rest of the poems in the magazine go downhill from there. I have told you before of my dislike for free verse. I was disappointed to see that the rest of the magazine contained nothing but that, with none of the treasured forms I hold so dear. That is not to say the rest of the poems are completely devoid of merit – “Never Never in Neverland” and “Common Ancestry” stand out as the other two excellent poems – but the magazine reaches its poetic peak with opening “Sicily.”

It is in its short-short stories that the magazine truly shines. Unfortunately, “The Memory Man” is the first that pops up, and although its premise is great, the style is overstated, too much is said. The author has too little faith in his reader. Instead of taking a melancholic stroll down memory lane, I trudged through it under the glare of the summer sun.

“What Kills You” is the second short-short in the magazine and by far my favorite. The beginning is all mystery: who is Yemeni (a vaguely Middle Eastern name, but another paragraph in the reader realizes they are not in the Middle East)? Who are the Guardians? What world do they live in? Like all short-shorts, very few of these questions are answered, except for the first, in lovely detail. In two short pages we come to know all of Yemeni. We see his past relationships through the lens of the contemplative present and mourn with him all that was never meant to be. A true testament to the skill of the author is that I never felt sad at the death of such a sympathetic main character; his life had been one long chain of tragedies and his death, inevitably, had simply been the final link.

Not all the short stories in the collection are as brilliant. “Sweet” fails to truly communicate the intricacies of the narrator’s parents, “Two Tickets to Warsaw” never quite achieves the humdrum, regretful tone it imitates, and the premise of “Something Dirty for My Wife” is slightly too contrived for the story to stand alone, but even these are worth a read (and certainly more so than the poetry). The other short-short I enjoyed a great deal was “Remnants,” but it, too, suffered from problems of overstatement. The overstatement, however, did not take away too much from the story’s plot or tone, and the ending will always be a dark, deliciously unexpected twist.

One final note: the magazine is sloppy. I do not expect The New Yorker levels of attention to detail, but its systematic problems are too pervasive to ignore. Several times the spaces between words were not present, the font was inconsistent through the piece, and even some phrases were duplicated right next to the original phrase. I would not call these huge problems, but when they did appear, they detracted from enjoyment of the story. I was more amazed than anything else that mistakes that should have been eliminated on just a cursory proofreading still appeared.