OBJECTS IN THE TERRIFYING TENSE / LONGING FROM TAKING PLACE
by Leslie Scalapino
"In this book, Scalapino brilliantly rethinks the essay, the politics of identity, & the projects of poetry. Objects in the Terrifying Tense / Longing from Taking Place is necessary reading, marvelous writing. "
- Charles Bernstein
"An extended tour de force in essay form, turning on an absolute present tense improvisational response to world and word, creating throughout, Stein-like, the terms of its own argument. An astonishing--and at the same time basic--piece of work."
- Norman Fischer
"We value Leslie Scalapino's act of writing for taking us to the rim of a textual eros full of mystery and lucidity at one but not the same time. These essays evoke multiple senses of time--a long history of con/texts, a recent past full of local excess and global abuse, and a present surface tension brimming with developing meaning. Here is the brilliance of a writer who acts on her knowledge that "we don't have words at all;" but also that "the text is erotic not simply by withholding," but in so far as it touches "the rim of occurring." How can language with its dense etymologies and indebtedness to institutional inertias do such a thing? Scalapino achieves the shimmering moment of words as forms of life through a transmission that does not attempt, or pretend, to pin anything down."
- Joan Retallack
"Leslie Scalapino's meticulous commitment to understanding certain writings has resulted in this wonderful book. 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 is a moment of reading, spectacular, in place and with momentum. "
- Lyn Hejinian