Leslie Scalapino's meticulous commitment to understanding certain writings has resulted in this wonderful book Objects in a Terrifying Tense / Longing from Taking Place. It proposes that such an understanding does not fix ideas or limit the attention. Rather "to understand" gives one access to perpetually gliding present– an enormous guided moment of mobile thought. This moment– or what she calls "reality"– is the realm of understanding, and it is also the only grounds for it. Objects in the Terrifying Tense / Longing from Taking Place,/i> is a moment of reading, spectacular, in place and with momentum. — Lyn Hejinian