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