PositiveThe Seattle Review of BooksReading Kristen Radtke’s Imagine Wanting Only This conjured this familiar feeling, a sense of intimacy only capable of expression through distance and projection — a space where virtual and literal realities intersect ... it is not the shock of acute grief that Radtke chooses to grapple with, but instead the long game of grief, elusive yet persistent, which lingers in the wake of loss. A latent mourning that follows for years, camouflaged in the ongoingness of daily life ... Sustaining a book-length piece of work with this trope could grow exhausting for the reader, but the graphic form reduces the opportunity for navel-gazing. The illustrations speak for themselves and prevent thematic overexposure in their ability to say so much through Radtke’s expert hand — facial expressions contain complex multitudes; blurred silhouettes capture the tenuousness of all we hold onto. Radtke also offers a glimpse, however briefly, of the other side of ruins — they don’t just memorialize degradation and loss, their perseverance is also evidence of stubborn survival. In Radtke’s world of ruins, there is stunted endurance, half-beating hearts that manage to persist, albeit in amputized and atrophic forms. Here, ruin porn feels less like exploitation and more like a trauma ritual. It is a comfort to take the pain of loss and project it onto structures that physically mirror incompleteness. While Radtke doesn’t offer much solace, she manages to avoid leaving the reader with a leaden sense of melancholy. Instead, the book reads as a quiet gift, a visual landscape for navigating a universal human experience: how we must all carry on through the negative space of grief, missing brick by missing brick.
