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A compilation of poetry by the much neglected, early twentieth-century avant-garde poet is accompanied by a concise profile of the enigmatic writer's turbulent life. Reprint.Amazon.com Review
Roger L. Conover, the editor of this excellent posthumouscollection, has done the poetry-reading world quite a favor. Many ofthese poems originally appeared in long-defunct and nearly forgottenavant-garde journals, and have never before been available in bookform. Mina Loy was a favorite of the other modernists (Ezra Poundthought she was as important a writer as William Carlos Williams andMarianne Moore), and the energy in her writing is trulyimpressive. Here's a taste, from "Mexican Desert": "Thebelching ghost-wail of the locomotive / trailing her rattling woodentail / into the jazz-band sunset ... " Included here, too, areLoy's essays about poetry, futurism, and feminism. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

If you like T.S. Eliot...
Mina Loy is a treasure waiting to be discovered by the public. In the early 1900's she was part of the Bohemian Greenwich Village art scene, with the likes of Marcell Duchamp and William Carlos Williams. As an individual she was independent, sophisticated, mythical, intelligent, and enigmatic. Her poetry was refined, Surrealist, intellectual, psuedo-scientific, futuristic and abstract. A hundred years ago, when Loy arrived in America, everyone was asking: "Who is this strange woman?" Today, people are still asking this same question. Discover her for yourself.

a must for poets
I came across Loy in reading about the women of Paris. I have never come back to any book more than this one. Her craft of wordsmith continues to inspire and always make me feel like i'm reading the most interesting book of poetry.

The most neglected talent of the century.
As an English major at a respected private college, I did not encounter this phenomenal woman's work. Five years later, I ask myself why. Stunning, intelligent, ground-breaking verse.

Mina Loy did not pursue literary fame (though she hobnobbed with the best), and it is, perhaps for this reason that I find her work so intriguing.Unhampered by criticism, Loy's work evokes a rare liberty. It is both poised and raw.

See also, BECOMING MODERN (her biography), for further adventures of this feminist, model, actress, painter, poet. ... Read more

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The poet and visual artist Mina Loy (1882-1966) has long had an underground reputation as an exemplary avant-gardist. Born in London of mixed Jewish and English parentage, and a restless and much photographed beauty, she moved in the pivotal circles of international modernism, where her friends and lovers included Gertrude Stein, Marinetti, Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Cornell, Djuna Barnes, the poet-boxer Arthur Cravan, and the Surrealists and Man Ray. Carolyn Burke's riveting, authoritative biography brings this highly original and representative figure wonderfully alive, in the process giving us a new picture of modernismand one woman's important contribution to it.Amazon.com Review
Altering her family name, wearing the clothes she wanted(which she designed herself), encouraging nudity among her children,writing about sex, and befriending derelicts were among the lifeachievements of English poet Mina Loy(1882-1966). Loy emerged out of a tortured childhood into the age offree love and expression in Europe and America with irrepressibleforce. Though her behavior was at times reproachable, such as when shedumped her children in Florence to go gallivant among the elite in NewYork, her story is always interesting. Biographer Carolyn Burke tellsit in generous detail in Becoming Modern. ... Read more

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Lunar Splendor
Mina Loy's well on her way to rejoining the Modernist Hall of Fame, and Carolyn Burke deserves credit for stoking the fires with this full-scale biography, the first (but I hope not the last) word on Loy's life and achievement. Loy enjoyed a view from the center during the evolution of modern art c. 1905-1940, and her list of friends, lovers and acquaintances reads like a 20th-century Who's Who: F.T. Marinetti, Arthur Cravan, Gertrude Stein, Marcel Duchamp, James Joyce, Peggy Guggenheim, Constantine Brancusi, Walter Arensberg, William Carlos Williams, Mabel Dodge, Djuna Barnes, Ezra Pound--virtually anybody who was anybody in the international art circuit between the wars seemed to know and remember Loy.

Having famous friends is a tricky business, and in Burke's account the roll call of Loy's intimates threatens to eclipse her own distinctive work in poetry and the visual arts. Burke inadvertently assigns Loy a sort of secondary role in her own life, throwing over a deeper analysis of her poetry and prose to focus on the colorful age she lived in. I put down the book knowing more about Loy's world than about her own work or vision, or why Burke thinks it's important; she seems more attracted to the parade of bohemians and makers of famous "isms" that moved through Loy's life than she is to the poetry, which she stops to consider less often than you'd expect, and then in abbreviated soundbites. Still, this is a good place to start if you're at all interested in Loy and the work that's been done on her in the decade since this book first appeared.

Very Informative, but Very Dense
Mina Loy led an extraordianry life and was clearly an artist creating before her time. This book is exhaustingly researched, a veritable Loy tome. If you love Mina Loy, it is certainly a must-read. It is very dense in parts though and often explains much more than is needed. The diction is very elevated, which often gives this the feel of an university book written for other academics. It's unfortunate though, because the book does a wonderful job of chronicling her life. This is often weighed down by the feeling that this book is seeking to impress rather than inform.

Brilliant biography of modernism
This biography of the madcap artist-poet, Mina Loy, is a masterpiece of the genre.Exhaustively researched by a meticulous scholar, the book's rich detail and witty slant make it read like a well-written novel.Itsscenes are so vivid, in fact, that a recent novelization (unauthorized) ofit has appeared and is receiving all the wonderful reviews that rightfullybelong to Burke's book (see Logue). ... Read more

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stunning psycho-scientific fiction
Engrossing fictional portrait of the strange marginal surrealist Richard Oelze as viewed through Mina Loy's friendship and scrutinizing curiosity of him. ... Read more

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The first substantial collection of criticism devoted to this long neglected major Modernist poet. ... Read more

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Read the biography!
If you enjoyed this book, you'll be fascinated by Carolyn Burke's wonderful biography, Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy. Rich, detailed, dishy, thoughtful and unabashedly feminist, it explores the complex relationships, feelings and events underlying Mina Loy's work and restores this forgotten writer to her rightful place in American and international literature. ... Read more

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Reader's Reaction
I have submitted a more formal review elsewhere, but wanted to encourage readers who study modernist poetry to consult this book. You do not have to be a specialist in the poetry of Mina Loy, Marianne Moore, or Else Lasker-Schüler in order to find this book useful. Whereas we have heard something about Moore and Loy, learning about Else Lasker-Schüler's alternate identity, the Jewish, male Prince Jussuf, was really entertaining, and an example of how travestism is not necessarily based on sexuality.Miller has done a great job of blending cultural studies with poetic analysis. I especially appreciated her comments on the cultural settings particular to women in New York and Berlin. The three main chapters deal with the naming acts of the poets, the ways in which they construct their poetic bodies, and how Judaic traditions have had an influence on the poetry of all three.This volume can be read cover to cover, or in isolated sections. Miller has taken examples from numerous unpublished manuscripts, so Cultures of Modernism is a find for those working specifically on these poets as well. Happy reading! ... Read more

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This book examines the early work of William Carlos Williams in relationship to a women's tradition of American poetry, as represented by Mina Loy, Denise Levertov and Kathleen Fraser--three generations of women poets working in or directly from a modernist tradition.Linda Kinnahan traces notions of the feminine and the maternal that develop as Williams seeks to create a modern poetics.Positioning Williamas in relationship to these three generations of Anglo-American women, the book pursues two questions: what can women poets, writing with an informed awareness of Williams, teach us about his modernist poetics of contact, and just as importantly, what can they teach us about the process, for women, of constructing a self within a male-dominated tradition? ... Read more

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Posthumously launched as the "electric-age Blake", Mina Loy's futurist techniques were unlike anything British critics had seen before; her subjects - sex, parturitiion, prostitution, suicide, addiction, retardation - were considered shocking even by some modernists. Updating and correcting the earlier book, this edition features previously unknown works by Loy rescued from Dada archives and avant-garde magazines. All of Loy's futurist and feminist satires are included, as are the poems from her Paris and New York periods, the cycle of "Love Songs", and her portraits-in-verse which define the trajectory of her favoured company and geography - from fellow modernist Joyce and Brancusi in Paris in the 1920s to fellow destitutes in New York's Lower East Side in the 1940s. ... Read more

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"The Salt Companion to Mina Loy" comprises ten essays by leading scholars and writers on the work of modernist poet Mina Loy. Loy (1882-1966) formed part of the new generation of poets who revolutionised writing in the early twentieth century. She had personal and artistic links to Italian Futurism and Parisian Surrealism, as well as to individuals such as James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, Djuna Barnes and Gertrude Stein. Working with reference to, but also often against the ideas of these fellow writers, her experimental, witty and inconoclastic poems were both distinctive and arresting. Since the republication of her poems in 1996-7, Loy has gained in stature and importance both in the UK and the US: her writing is now seen as central to literary innovations in the 1910s and 1920s, and she is often a set author on undergraduate and MA courses. Apart from the collection of essays "Mina Loy: Woman and Poet" published twelve years ago, there is currently no single book on Loy's work in print. The Companion will be an invaluable new resource for students and readers of modernism.It provides new perspectives and cutting-edge research on Loy's work and is distinctive in its consideration of her prosodic and linguistic experiments alongside a discussion of the literary and historical contexts in which she worked. The contributors include influential and emerging experts in modernist studies. They are Peter Nicholls, Tim Armstrong, Geoff Gilbert, David Ayers, Andrew Robertson, John Wilkinson, Suzanne Hobson, Rachel Potter, Alan Marshall, Rowan Harris and Sandeep Parmar. ... Read more

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This digital document is an article from MELUS, published by Thomson Gale on September 22, 2005. The length of the article is 10567 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Eugenicist mistress & ethnic mother: Mina Loy and futurism, 1913-1917.(Critical Essay)
Author: Aimee L. Pozorski
Publication: MELUS (Magazine/Journal)
Date: September 22, 2005
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 30Issue: 3Page: 41(29)

Article Type: Critical Essay

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Purchase includes free access to book updates online and a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Chapters: Joan Crawford, Doris Day, Nancy Astor, Viscountess Astor, Kay Kyser, Waldorf Astor, 2nd Viscount Astor, Mina Loy, Philip Kerr, 11th Marquess of Lothian, Martin Melcher, Blanche Calloway, Marion Bloom. Excerpt:Blanche Calloway (February 9, 1904 - December 16, 1978) was a Jazz singer , bandleader , and composer from Baltimore, Maryland . She is not as well known as her younger brother Cab Calloway , but she may have been the first woman to lead an all male orchestra. Cab Calloway often credited her with being the reason he got into show business. She made her first recordings in 1925, with Louis Armstrong as a sideman on the session. She recorded with a number of groups from the late 1920s through 1935, recording with Ruben Reeves and his River Boys in 1929 and fronting the Andy Kirk band briefly before forming Blanche Calloway and Her Joy Boys (with several members of that organization). In 1938 she disbanded the orchestra and worked as a solo act. In 1939 she converted to the Church of Christ, Scientist From the 1950s through the 1970s, she worked as a disc jockey and later program director at WMBM in Florida. Websites (URLs online) A hyperlinked version of this chapter is at Doris Day Doris Day (born Doris Mary Ann Kappelhoff ; April 3, 1922) is an American actress, singer, and animal rights activist. Day's entertainment career began in her late teens as a big band singer. In 1945 she had her first hit recording , "Sentimental Journey ", and, in 1948, appeared in her first film, Romance on the High Seas . During her entertainment career, she had appeared in thirty-nine films, recorded more than six-hundred-fifty songs, received an Academy Award nomination, won a Golden Globe and a Grammy Award , and, in 1989, received the Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievement in mot... ... Read more