ALT “We recognize pattern only after having been conditioned to it long enough to see it as pattern, a comfort, which we miss when we're abruptly released from it. A poem is a system of patterns by which information gets delivered in a manner specific to each poem. Another way to say it is that pattern is a system of restraint and release: we're held by pattern, then periodically released from it. Via the poem, the poet controls our passage down the page both in terms of what we get to know and how we know it. To this extent, poetry is not just a bodily thing but an erotic one. As with eros, the first aim is to get another's…” - Carl Phillips, Muscularity & Eros: On Syntax

ALT As the family remained in its perpetual crisis, fantasy worlds of incest tended to be staged in the McMansions and resorts of the shrinking leisure classes, most apparent in the explosion of incest porn in the 21st century. Searches for incest and various configurations of family & stepfamily terms—mother, daughter, stepsister—routinely top searches on porn website Pornhub. As legal scholar Elaine Craig notes, popular incest porn “eroticizes not simply incestuous sexual activity but incestuous sexual violence [. . .] and [. . .] frequently replicates the same sexual scripts reflected in the offending patterns of sexually abusive fathers & brothers.” Much incest porn is presented as ostensibly consensual and an unexpected benefit of the breakdown and reconstitution of families; remarriage becomes a site of overt eroticization of the family home. Like the positive incest of the 1970s, contemporary fantasies of consensual incest are imbricated in the sexual violences endemic to the family

ALT These films stage their erotic families in the McMansions that are one of the key signifiers of the untenable and precarious housing market that has wracked American family life since the late 1970s and metastasized in the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis. Indeed, in porn series like PropertySex, the fetishization of the property competes with the actors in the scenes. As Connie Scozzaro and Jeff Nagy note, the series “repositions pornography in the home, setting itself the task of imagining an erotic resolution to the post-crisis problem of frustrated property ownership and impossible rental markets.” In incest porn, similarly set in the McMansions of California and Florida, the attempted resolution of the crisis occurs through incest. It’s almost as if the willingness to stage familial sex is what secures this fraught housing. The family is not only a sociological unit, but a whole constellation of homes, property, wages, representations, desires, and wishes.

ALT cover of HFR (hayden's ferry review)