Purchase

“Mina Loy . . . was a charter member of the generation that . . . launched the modernist revolution in poetry in the United States. Loy was too radical for Poetry’s editor Harriet Monroe, who published her poetry only in a review article, but the generation’s more innovative members admired her defiant honesty of subject and applauded the new directions she advanced for poetry.”

– Virginia M. Kouidis, Dictionary of Literary Biography

“Mina Loy . . . has always been able to understand.”

– Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

Mina Loy: Woman and Poet represents the first substantial collection of criticism devoted to this major Modernist poet, whose work is now undergoing significant reassessment and revival throughout the international literary and poetry communities. Editors Keith Tuma and Maeera Y. Shreiber have assembled an impressive lineup of essays about Loy’s work, a previously unpublished interview with Loy, biographical remembrances, and an annotated bibliography of works by and about Loy. Contributors include Kathleen Fraser, Barbara Guest, Marjorie Perloff, Peter Quartermain, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Carolyn Burke, and Roger Conover. In the words of the editors, this volume attempts, in part, to answer the question, “What critical posture, what methodology, would be altogether true to the spirit of a body of poems that includes much jostling among the elegaic, the satiric, and the erotic, sapphoesque density and epigrammatic abstractions?”

Contents

Love Songs to Joannes

Eric Murphy Selinger, “Love in the Time of Melancholia”

Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “‘Seismic Organism’: Sexual Intercourse and Narrative Meaning in Mina Loy”

Peter Quartermain, “‘The Tattle of Tongueplay’: Mina Loy’s Love Songs”

Maeera Shreiber, “‘Love Is a Lyric / of Bodies’: The Negative Aesthetics of Mina Loy’s Love Songs to Joannes”

Jeffrey Twitchell-Waas, “‘Little Lusts and Lucidities’: Reading Mina Loy’s Love Songs”

Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose

Marjorie Perloff, “English as a ‘Second’ Language: Mina Loy’s ‘Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose’”

Elisabeth Frost, “Mina Loy’s ‘Mongrel’ Poetics”

Keith Tuma, “Mina Loy’s ‘Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose’”

Enter Mina Loy

Mina Loy: Interview with Paul Blackburn and Robert Vas Dias, introduction by Carolyn Burke

Roger Conover, “(Re) Introducing Mina Loy”

Susan Gilmore, “Imna, Ova, Mongrel, Spy: Anagram and Imposture in the Work of Mina Loy”

Anita Helle, “Playing with Elegy: Mina Loy’s Poetry of Mourning”

Tyrus Miller, “‘Everyman His Own Fluroscope’: Mina Loy’s Insel Between Aura and Image Machine”

Ellen Keck Stauder, “Mina Loy on Brancusi and the Futurists”

Janet Lyon, “Mina Loy’s Pregnant Pauses: The Space of Possibility in the Florence Writings”

Marisa Januzzi, “Mongrel Rose: The ‘Unerring Esperanto’ of Loy’s Poetry”

Susan E. Dunn, “Mina Loy, Fashion, and the Avant-Garde”

Richard Cook, “The ‘Infinitarian’ and Her ‘Macro-Cosmic Presence’: The Question of Loy and Christian Science”

A Poet’s Corner

Kathleen Fraser, “‘Contingent Circumstances’: Mina Loy/Basil Bunting”

Norma Cole, “A Few Words About Mina Loy”

Barbara Guest, “Note on Mina Loy”

Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “A Letter on Loy”

Anne Waldman, “Tantrik Loy”

Bibliography

Marisa Januzzi, “A Bibliography of Works By and About Mina Loy”