Books
Books
in random order
Holy Smoke
Why they said, “Your real name is Anon,” I’ll never know ... But now that I have a name, I know I must write ... I’m scared, but feel it is time to be really bad.
Republished for the first time since its 1979 release, in a new revised edition, Holy Smoke is an account of the frenzy and paranoia of United States politics refracted through one individual’s psyche. With her theme of a child disappeared – and all that that phrase carries with it – Howe captures the chaos of reality in her salient mix of poetry and prose. Readers will find it hard to believe that this book, which gives fresh sense to the demand for universal human rights, was written in the last century.
At once evocative and subtly incisive, Howe’s writing seems almost like a new language, a language that has been in hiding. She can make the familiar haunting and the ordinary a provocation. She has written some of the remarkable books of her time. —Adam Phillips
A wonder of acid wit and Americana, Holy Smoke turns grief into a game and chaos into canticles. Bricolage at its best: incisive, inventive and intimate. It’s the exact work I needed in my life. —Navid Sinaki
bruit
Hardcover, offset printing, 508 p., 31.8 x 25 cm. Printed by Cultura, Gent
Edition of 265 copies. A deluxe edition, accompanied by an original work numbered n/508 (oil pastel on paper A3), has been produced in 35 copies signed and numbered by the artist .
She Follows No Progression
She Follows No Progression reflects on the plurality of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951–1982)’s work and legacy, collecting essays, personal narratives, poems, conversations, letters, and the extratextual in a reader that attests to Cha’s genre-bending vision and political imagination. The writers, artists, scholars, organizers, and educators collected here, each unique in their voice and method, multiply approaches to language, colonial history, migration, and time in dialogue with Cha’s unequivocally interdisciplinary practice. Their contributions traverse subjects from Asian American studies to literary history, translation, film theory, and experimental poetics, while attending to the gaps between these fields and the intractable entanglements of race, class, and gender that underlie them. She Follows No Progression echoes Cha’s appeal for a liberatory horizon emergent from all that we are affixed to in the present.
She Follows No Progression is published on the occasion of the 2022 program, The Quick and the Dead: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Edition. The Quick and the Dead is a yearlong, multiphase project that highlights the life, work, and legacy of a deceased writer by bridging their work to that of contemporary practitioners. In its third year, the program focused on Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.
Contributors:
Sam Cha, Marian Chudnovsky, Jesse Chun, Una Chung, Anton Haugen, Irene Hsu, Valentina Jager, Juwon Jun, Youbin Kang, Eunsong Kim, Youna Kwak, Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, Andrew Yong Hoon Lee, Jennifer Gayoung Lee, Sujin Lee, Florence Li, Serubiri Moses, Jed Munson, Yves Tong Nguyen, Wirunwan Victoria Pitaktong, Brandon Shimoda, Caterina Stamou, Megan Sungyoon, Teline Trần, and Soyoung Yoon.
the she
‘the she’ compares texts by Virginia Woolf with their French translation, reproducing parts of the novelles ‘The String Quartet' & ‘Blue and Green’ and the novel ‘The Years’. Of the novellas, she kept only the articles the in English and le, la, les in French, exactly as they appear in the editions. Of the novel, only the pronouns she in English and elle in French remain.
The publication includes identical two booklets, one bound and one unbound, both uncut, referring to old books which were often sold bound but uncut.
Offset printing. Printed by Cultura, Wetteren
Edition of 123 numbered copies
Across the Acheron
In her darkly funny 1985 take on Dante’s Divine Comedy, acclaimed French writer and activist Monique Wittig restages the journey through the circles of hell, limbo, paradise from a lesbian feminist perspective.
Never-before published in the US, Across the Acheron follows the adventures of “Wittig” and her anti-Virgilian guide through laundromats, billiard parlors, dyke bars, and picnic grounds of a 1980s San Francisco populated by hunters and their prey, lost souls, and fantastical beasts, including a robotic eagle and angelic bikers. Wittig reimagines Dante’s epic poem through a feminist and queer lens, subverting his cosmological order and upending gender identities and literary traditions. This edition brings the English translation of Wittig’s final novel back into print for the first time since the early-1990s, revised according to the author's notes, and with a new introduction by Sophie Lewis.
“Across the Acheron is a work of lesbian struggle and triumph across two kinds of hell. The hell of the classic western literary canon—and the hell of San Francisco. Monique Wittig brings all of her writerly powers and political experience to bear here, as witness to the horrors of heterosexual patriarchy and also to the possibility of another world for another life. Her work is a rare combination of deeply felt materialism and radical linguistic freedom. If we're to have another world, we'll need to create another language. She knew that, and she lived it.” — McKenzie Wark
“Even in fiction Monique Wittig’s writing is critical, prescient, brilliant, satirical, searing, and way ahead of its time. I’m so glad this work is back in circulation to revisit and revel in.” — Pamela Sneed
“In this unendurable yet compelling journey through the circles of patriarchal hell, Wittig encounters hordes of tortured women who do not struggle against their oppressors. Their brainwashing is as difficult to witness as their bloodied flesh. Only through communal activism does the seeker’s soul becomes tough enough to enter Paradise, where bare-breasted angels dismount motorcycles and offer baskets of 'cherries, strawberries, raspberries, apricots, peaches, plums, tomatoes, avocados, green melons, cantaloupes, watermelons, lemons, pawpaws, pineapples and coconuts.’ The bounties of Across the Acheron are lush and many.” — Dodie Bellamy
“A Guernica of the human (feminist) condition, a blacker, bleaker, more vengeful Alice’s tea party, this is a novel as graphic as a painting, whose brilliance its translators have creditably preserved.” — Publishers Weekly
Introduction by Sophie Lewis
Translated by David Le Vay with Margaret Crosland
Anarcadia
An epic poem in miniature, Anarcadia attempts to navigate the stark disintegration of the very world from which it’s made, mapping a catastrophe that seems both on its way and already occurring. Offering a collage of collapsing fragments – whirling ‘like bitstreams / in a blizzard’ – this sequence freefalls through a landscape of freak storms and surveillance satellites, ‘bio- / metric insects’ and ‘full- / body scanner[s]’, ‘leaving nothing left / undamned’. Continuing the sleek work of the previous collections, Hand’s command of language generates a livable terrain, humming with echoes of the pastoral tradition – from Sidney to Shelley, from Geoffrey Hill to J.H. Prynne. Hand’s poetry renders ‘an animate / climate’, through which we are forced to face the debris of a system that has failed us and a planet we, in turn, have failed. Nevertheless, the poet shows us a glimpse of the future. At the heart of Anarcadia is something of a love poem, revealing beauty in the art of losing, a way to ‘Re-salvage / sylvan camouflage / out of obscure selvage’, attempting a recovery. ‘Rife with hybrid vigour’, this book confirms Dominic Hand to be a poet of singular, clear-sighted vision, unafraid to see things as they are, ‘risking / bewilderment’.
– Rowland Bagnall
Sustaining the Otherwise
Sustaining the Otherwise is a collaborative research and artistic project about restitution, reparation and transformation taking place in multiple locations over several years. Initiated and conceptualized by researchers and curators Amal Alhaag & Selene Wendt, it offers a space for artists, activists, scholars and writers to be in dialogue and to explore the topic of restitution in relation to both material and immaterial culture, through a program that frames restitution within the context of contemporary art practice.
Edited by Amal Alhaag & Selene Wendt
Featuring an introduction by Amal Alhaag & Selene Wendt as well as provocations, reflections, and essays by Barby Asante, Michael Barrett, Quinsy Gario, Sana Ginwalla, Aude Christel Mgba, Lennon Mhsishi, Ogutu Muraya, in addition to a sonic contribution by Robert Machiri.
Deep Listening
Deep Listening is a practice created by composer Pauline Oliveros in order to enhance her own as well as other's listening skills. She teaches this practice worldwide in workshops, retreats and in her ground breaking Deep Listening classes at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Mills College. Deep Listening practice is accessible to anyone with an interest in listening. Undergraduates with no musical training benefit from the practices and successfully engage in creative sound projects. Many report life changing effects from participating in the Deep Listening classes and retreats.
A Very Large Array: Selected Poems
Osman's writing reinvents poetry as an instrument for dissecting vision, language and power
This extensive collection of poet Jena Osman's acclaimed work spans more than 30 years, gathering poems from journals and books long out of print. Her poetry traces overlooked visual and linguistic incidents across centuries of American history, transforming "official" language—from Supreme Court opinions to the chatter of Predator drone pilots—into writing that is comic, chilling and relentlessly inventive.
Jena Osman's (born 1963) books include Motion Studies (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2019), Public Figures (Wesleyan University Press, 2012), The Network (Fence Books, 2010, selected for the National Poetry Series in 2009), An Essay in Asterisks (Roof Books, 2004) and The Character (Beacon Press, winner of the 1998 Barnard New Women Poets Prize). She lives in Philadelphia.
Pyre
Michael Cavuto, Astrid Terrazas
"From this moment / and hence backwards / a visitation / echoes thru the apparent opening / to the tomb / the narrow passage is the mind's reasoning / in clarity / as she moves like a shadow / having lived her life before " — Joanne Kyger, from Places to Go (Black Sparrow, 1970)
"All processes measured as form are traceable in curved decay. Seemingly unmeasurable, unquenchable, the heart stone harbors its own native entropy. The evolution of organs is not ours to decipher. We’re drawn slanting toward the stone in helices of approaching circles. Our movements throw shadows, our bodies ring haloes." — Michael Cavuto, "Isis Theses"
"In the dual work of Isis Theses & Pyre I-V, living, death, language’s work of remembrance, place & poetic lineage all take part in shifting throughlines of recombinant forms, as a spiral spirals back on itself, changed over time. Early on, here, Cavuto writes “There is not enough wood for coffins. There is wood enough for a boat.” a Pyre then is a boat, a burning that is going somewhere, not death-as-end but as an upward & outward movement into collectively shared air, an archeology of connection. “Kyger wrote that memory is a weird dimension carried around invisibly in the ‘mind’’ Cavuto writes, in one of those moments that feels like a key, “Writing, she said, gives history back to you.” But it is not only history that Cavuto is carrying forward in these poems, it is something more spatially complex, enlivened & embodied in the dance of the words, & in the vital breakdown of the words themselves. The poems in Pyre I-V enact their answer to the question ‘what essence is left us when no words are left,’ & leave us, after the ritual process, dazzled with the true sense that something is left, something important of resonance & remembrance, in the atomized language-space; the air around the dis-integrating morphemes shimmering on the page as dissipative, potentiate sparks. —Cody-Rose Clevidence
Michael Cavuto is a poet based in Brooklyn, New York. His books include Country Poems (Knife Fork Book, 2020) and Pyre (Spiral Editions, 2025). With the poets Dale Smith and Hoa Nguyen, he publishes the Slow Poetry in America Newsletter. Along with Tessa Bolsover, he publishes hand-bound poetry books through auric press.
Pyre, Michael Cavuto. Illustrations by Astrid Terrazas. 52p, 8.5" x 6.75", hand sewn with red linen thread. Covers letterpressed on a 1963 Vandercook proof press with Strathmore Premium Grandee paper. Copy text and illustrations printed both offset and digitally on Mohawk felt paper in a first edition of 275. Printed, assembled, and bound in “Kingston, New York,” the unceded and currently occupied lands of the Haudenosaunee, Mohican, Munsee Lenape, and Schaghticoke. With thanks to Vladimir Nahitchevansky and the various friends who helped assemble.
Facing Blackness
“In Facing Blackness, Ashley Clark traces the contours of Bamboozled, guiding readers through Lee’s intricate representation of race, politics, and popular culture. Clark moves beyond straightforward film criticism to situate the film within a complex history of blackness and American entertainment, making a powerful argument for its ongoing relevance and vitality. Thoughtful, rigorous, and witty, Facing Blackness is a thoroughly engaging analysis of this monumental film that is imperative reading for fans of Spike Lee and cinephiles more broadly.” — Racquel Gates, author of Double Negative: The Black Image and Popular Culture
Ashley Clark is a writer, critic and film programmer. He was born in London, lives in Jersey City, and works in Manhattan. Facing Blackness, initially published in 2015, is his first book. This revised second edition contains a new foreword.
The Minor Gesture
In this wide-ranging and probing book Erin Manning extends her previous inquiries into the politics of movement to the concept of the minor gesture. The minor gesture, although it may pass almost unperceived, transforms the field of relations. More than a chance variation, less than a volition, it requires rethinking common assumptions about human agency and political action. To embrace the minor gesture's power to fashion relations, its capacity to open new modes of experience and manners of expression, is to challenge the ways in which the neurotypical image of the human devalues alternative ways of being moved by and moving through the world—in particular what Manning terms "autistic perception." Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis and Whitehead's speculative pragmatism, Manning's far-reaching analyses range from fashion to depression to the writings of autistics, in each case affirming the neurodiversity of the minor and the alternative politics it gestures toward.
I have been enthralled and held by this book! Erin Manning has given us a new theory of bearing, as well as a new elaboration of gesture, going beyond Balzac’s theory and Agamben’s interpretation of it. She doesn’t lament the loss of gesture but celebrates gesture's minoritization.
- Fred Moten
Le Sacrifice comme acte poétique
Angélica Liddell, Christilla Vasserot
Mise en scène, écriture – pièces de théâtre, poésie, récits, journaux – et présence sur scène : tout est lié chez Angélica Liddell. L’art et la vie, la fiction et la biographie, la création poétique et la réflexion théorique entretiennent les uns avec les autres des liens évidents et complexes. Ce volume inclut une série de textes qui, depuis une perspective théorique, éclairent en partie la pratique théâtrale de leur auteur, contribuant à la construction d’une poétique toujours inachevée, basée sur une expérience vitale.
Dans cet essai recueillant douze conférences et entretiens, Angélica Liddell évoque la création artistique ainsi que son processus dramaturgique très organique et très violent car « la violence poétique est nécessaire pour combattre la violence réelle ».
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Direction, writing—plays, poetry, stories, journals—and stage presence: everything is interconnected in Angélica Liddell’s work. Art and life, fiction and biography, poetic creation and theoretical reflection maintain obvious yet complex connections with one another. This volume includes a series of texts that, from a theoretical perspective, shed light on the author’s theatrical practice, contributing to the construction of an ever-unfinished poetics rooted in lived experience.
In this essay, which brings together twelve lectures and interviews, Angélica Liddell discusses artistic creation as well as her highly organic and violent dramaturgical process, for “poetic violence is necessary to combat real violence.”
Installation Views
Conceived as a visual résumé, Installation Views provides both a comprehensive overview of Charlotte Posenenske's solo exhibitions and a record of her numerous group shows.
In her Manifesto, Charlotte Posenenske stated: "I find it difficult to come to terms with the fact that art can contribute nothing to the solution of pressing social problems."
Developing her artistic practice throughout the 1960s, Posenenske produced a body of work that uniquely combined several strands of the art of the period: conceptualism, minimalism, and socially engaged participatory art. Her Manifesto, published in Art International in May 1968, lays out the social demands on art as well as the impossibility of fulfilling those demands. Shortly after its publication, Posenenske left the art world behind to pursue her studies in sociology, undertaking a new career in that field.
Conceived as a visual résumé, Installation Views provides both a comprehensive overview of Charlotte Posenenske's solo exhibitions and a record of her numerous group shows. The book features an essay written by curator Erlend Hammer on the role of documentary photographs in the circulation of works of art.
The book was published in conjunction with the eponymous show at the Haugar Art Museum in Tønsberg, Norway—the first full-scale presentation of the artist's oeuvre in Scandinavia. The exhibition showcased works from all the artist's major series of modular sculpture. Consisting of works made over the course of less than 12 months, between 1967 and 1968, preceding the abrupt end to Posenenske's career as an artist, the exhibition had the character of a snapshot. We are left wondering whether her withdrawal from the art world was a logical or necessary consequence of the development of the series. What are we to do with Posenenske's assertion that art is powerless to effectively change society for the better?
Autobiography of Death
‘I thought to myself that I needed to sing death, perform a rite for death, write death, then bid farewell to it. The way to send death away was to sing with my own death all the death in the sky and on the ground.’
The title section of Kim Hyesoon’s visceral Autobiography of Death consists of forty-nine poems, each poem representing a single day during which the spirit roams after death before it enters the cycle of reincarnation. The poems not only give voice to those who met unjust deaths during Korea’s violent contemporary history, but also unveil what Kim calls ‘the structure of death, that we remain living in’. Autobiography of Death at once re-enacts trauma and narrates death – how we die and how we survive within this cyclical structure. In this sea of mirrors, the plural ‘you’ speaks as a body of multitudes that has been beaten, bombed, and buried many times over by history. The volume concludes on the other side of the mirror with ‘Face of Rhythm’, a poem about individual pain, illness, and meditation.
Winner of the 2019 International Griffin Poetry Prize
Winner of the 2019 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize
Celebrating the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival
Sinister Wisdom 103: Celebrating the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival honors the forty-year legacy of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival (1976–2015). Sinister Wisdom 103: Celebrating the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival celebrates this embodiment of radical feminist separatist collaboration, transformational self-defined autonomous spaces, a commitment to sisterhood and matriarchal culture, and a musical city sprung from the earth for one week in the woods.
A collective of five womyn each with a deep connection to Fest operated by consensus to create this issue. Striving to represent a range of womyn’s voices, values, traditions, and experiences of Fest, the collective highlighted what Fest has meant to generations of womyn, documented its chronology, and bore witness to the power of this community. Sinister Wisdom 103: Celebrating the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival includes womyn from multiple races, geographies, sexualities, generations, and gender and other social identities. Just as Fest brought together womyn from various backgrounds, our collection includes a range of artistic experience, from seasoned authors and photographers to those womyn new to publishing.
Sinister Wisdom 103: Celebrating the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival remembers the transformations, possibilities, and hopes for spaces cultivating the ongoing empowerment of womyn.
Incubation: a space for monsters
New edition of this long out of-print classic of diasporic literature, featuring a forward by Eunsong Kim, an afterword by Emgee Dufresne, and new endnotes by Bhanu Kapil.
Incubation: a space for monsters is a formally innovative, hybrid-genre book that incorporates poetry and prose. Set in a shifting narrative environment, where human bodies, characters, and text are neither one thing nor another, this fragmentary-diaristic text journeys through the spaces in-between. Originally published in America in 2006 by Leon Works, and out of print for the last seven years, this is the first time this seminal text has been available in the UK.
Following protagonist Laloo – Cyborg, girl, mother, child, immigrant, settler – on a roadtrip through American landscapes, genre styles, and form, Incubation creates radical space for what is ‘monstrous’. Appropriating iconic American tropes, and the structure of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Incubation explores the challenges faced by immigrants in attaining such notions of freedom in so hostile an environment. In this fragmentary document there is a celebration in the cobbling together of lives; global in scope, with an intimate focus on interior voice, this landmark text evidences the early innovations and talents of this T.S. Eliot prizewinning author.
CONSTANT VIOLINS I & II
CONSTANT VIOLINS is a hybrid book consisting of two parts, each comprised of two texts of sci-fi auto-fiction: ‘FӔTAL ATRACTUS’ & ‘COQUETTES’, ‘RATS LIVE ON NO EVIL STAR’ & ‘SOPH MOB’. CONSTANT VIOLINS follows mutating characters & contexts that grapple & contort in half-step with the logics of a vast labyrinth of psycho para-social references, playing out across a tête-bêche (or head-to-tail) format book. The myriad ‘worlds’ occupied & embodied narratively riff on the act of world-making in itself.
As an only child, I used to climb up onto my grandmother’s vanity & collapse the 3 way mirror over my head so I could bask in the calm of the many me’s preening inside its reflective continuum. Sometimes I would just lean against the looking glass above her bureau or pretend the wall was my simultaneous lover. No one wants to be alone. Under covers, I initiate the same sequences of experiments that virtually anyone does.
We all imagine what our pillows witness annually would baffle sane onlookers. That’s why we practice kissing on our dorsal carpal arches, peaches in the dead of night, or remove condoms from bananas with our teeth. CONSTANT VIOLINS wants what any book wants; to become a formidable power couple with its author like a Pokemon & its precocious Trainer.
Jordan/Martin Hell (b. 1993, USA) is a Black trans(2s) writer, artist, & scholar who attended Städelschule (DE) & Cooper Union School of Art. He is currently a PhD candidate at Queen Mary’s University of London. Hell’s work is interdisciplinary & interlaced with his writing as the seedbed for his various explorations across painting, sculpture, pedagogy, music, dance, etc. In all of his work Hell is invested in the embedded associations which proliferate in the global collective subconscious & how that frames intimate (& often violent) realities in the lives of individuals whether historical, celebrity, or obscure. Closely linked with his work is a spiritualist psychoanalytic practice which spans hypnosis, theology, philosophy, Black fugitivity, & indigenous somatics.
¶#3: The mental traveller
¶#3 consists of texts and images found on the online collaborative encyclopedia Wikipedia, BIC pen drawings by Kim David Bots and the poem The Mental Traveller by William Blake. ¶#3 is assembled by Kim David Bots, designed by Tjobo Kho, edited by Jan-Pieter ‘t Hart and published in an edition of 150 by OUTLINE in May 2022.
Estonian Academy of Arts / EKA GD MA
Typing...
The fourth in a series of publications, featuring writing by graphic design students of EKA GD MA. Typing... includes essays, scripts, translations and stories on a wide range of topics: killing vowels and milling fonts, personal knowledge management, shortcuts, tedious/careful/tiring/joyful typesetting, type of Georgianness, typing in 3rab(izi) and typing in all lowercase.
With contributions by Anna Wittenkamp Rich, Archil Tsereteli, Fa(tima)-Ezzahra El Khammas, João (Juca) Pedro Nogueira, Karthik Palepu, Laura Martens, Linnea Lindgren, Rok Ifko Kranjc.
Designed by Fatima-Ezzahra El Khammas and Laura Martens
Cover by Hanafi Gazali
Nova Scotia House
Nova Scotia House takes us to the heart of a relationship, a community and an era, both a love story and a lament.
In this profound meditation on grief, Johnny looks back at his relationship with his life partner, Jerry, after his AIDS-related death. When they met, nearly thirty years ago, Johnny was 19, Jerry was 45. They made a life on their own terms in Jerry’s flat: 1, Nova Scotia House. Johnny is still there today—but Jerry is gone, and so is the world they knew.
Intimate, visionary, and profoundly original—as well as raw, hot, and hilarious—Nova Scotia House marks the debut of a vibrant new voice in contemporary fiction.
Bulletin B – Issue 2
Contributions by Jerry Ahn, Han Ok-hee, Han Soon-ae, Lilian Gonzalez, Kim Jeon-seon, Miss Lee, Lee Jeong-hee, Hansen Oh, Yun Park, Seonha Park, Sun Hyejeong, Wang Gyu-won.
Bulletin B is a bilingual editorial project gathering artistic and cultural productions from Korea and its diasporas, with a focus on queer and womxn voices. Borrowing the spirit of an unofficial newsletter, it surfaces when it needs to; assembling poetry, prose, and cultural fragments across time.
Rooted in translation as a practice attentive to power, history, and silenced voices, Bulletin B reconstructs fragmented lineages and constellations of reference through irregular acts of dissemination and exchange, tracing how narratives move between languages, contexts, and material forms.
Malibongwe: Poems from the Struggle by ANC Women
In the late 1970s, Lindiwe Mabuza, a.k.a. Sono Molefe, sent out a call for poems written by women in anc camps and offices throughout Africa and the world. The book that resulted, published and distributed in Europe in the early 1980s, was banned by the apartheid regime.
Authorised by the editor, this re-issue of Malibongwe re-establishes a place for women artists in the history of South Africa's liberation. These are the struggles within the Struggle: a book that records the hopes and fears, the drives and disappointments, and the motivation and resilience of women at the front lines of the battle against apartheid. Here we see the evidence, too often airbrushed out of the narratives of national liberation, of a deep and unrelenting radicalism within women; of a dream of a South Africa in which not only freedom reigned, but justice too.
Girls Like Us #6 - Secrets
Jessica Geysel, Sara Kaaman and 2 more
A secret can be a private space for self-creation – or a shared site of pleasure.
We explore secrets in a plethora of forms and contexts. From layered accounts of mediaeval ecstasy to the unexplored sensory experience of smell. From camouflaged play to queer readings of astrological charts and the hidden history of house music. From a very analog point of view to the outskirts of the internet.