Preacher Biscuit's Books: "Things I Wanted To Tell You by Kristen Merola is a project based on the compulsion to free oneself of ideas and thoughts believed to be unproductive, although significant. Kristen has photographed her many diaries and notebooks where compulsive entries are written over the top of one another thereby erasing ideas, thoughts, and emotive feelings through the act of writing. The obsessive need to write diaristically is glaringly revealed even if the words themselves are unreadable. The photographs poetically paced in this volume divulge seasons of the mind that frame a code of jumbled, overwritten thoughts. In the end, Kristen's work is illuminated through obstruction." Aaron Cohick, Text, Image, Writing, Reading, JAB 27: "Things I Wanted to Tell You is driven by the relationships between text and image. ...To read this book we must move continuously between two discontinuous worlds, two means of representing a world, the world. We fall easily into one, but the other is just beneath the surface of the first, impenetrable, reflecting and deflecting our reading back at us, back into our world, a world, the world.... "It is possible to put forward a metaphoric reading of the book. We could start at the title, Things I Wanted to Tell You, and assume that the illegible writing represents those 'things,' and that those things have been made unspeakable, either through their own urgency or through the layered complexities of delay and time. This then, would be a book about a relationship, a relationship ended or suspended, with many things unsaid. We could put forward such a reading, if we like our books to end when we put them down. Or we could elaborate a different reading, one based in the relationship between the images and the text, a reading of the ways those elements interact, and such a reading could be extended productively, infinitely. We want our books to keep going after we put them down. We are concerned with the real book, the book in our hands, and the processes that it enacts. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.