The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems of Mina Loy [Paperback]

Mina Loy (Author), Roger L. Conover (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 8, 1997

Mina Loy's technique and subjects - prostitution, menstruation, destitution, and suicide - shock even some modernists and she vanished from the poetry scene as dramatically as she had appeared on it. Roger Conover has resuced the key texts from the pages of forgotten publications, and has included all of the futurist and feminist satires, poems from Loy's Paris and New York periods, and the complete cycle of "Love Songs," as well as previously unknown texts and detailed notes.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Roger L. Conover, the editor of this excellent posthumous collection, has done the poetry-reading world quite a favor. Many of these poems originally appeared in long-defunct and nearly forgotten avant-garde journals, and have never before been available in book form. Mina Loy was a favorite of the other modernists (Ezra Pound thought she was as important a writer as William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore), and the energy in her writing is truly impressive. Here's a taste, from "Mexican Desert": "The belching ghost-wail of the locomotive / trailing her rattling wooden tail / into the jazz-band sunset ... " Included here, too, are Loy's essays about poetry, futurism, and feminism.

From Publishers Weekly

Mina Loy's wry, confident inquiries into the nature of men, women and sexuality are a great undiscovered treasure of modernism. Though her work was published beside Eliot's and Pound's in the little magazines of the 1910s and 20s, we are perhaps only now, in the post-feminist '90s, fully equipped to handle it. Through both her work and her transcontinental, bon vivant lifestyle, Loy (1882-1966) defined the "modern" woman, a detached, unsentimental, brutally witty creature who called it as she saw it: "The skin sack/ in which a wanton duality/ packed/ all the completion of my infructious impulses/ something the shape of a man." Her cool ironies, heady carnality and innovative line placement blew away the remnants of Victorianism that clung to poetry, clearing the way for more up-front, if still unresolvable, relations between the sexes: "Let them clash together/ From their incognitoes/ In seismic orgasm." While the extensive textual notes included by Conover, an editor at MIT Press, may seem excessive (one wishes for more of the poetry), his selection also allows the cerebral Loy to emerge as a sophisticated critic-in-verse of contemporaries Marcel Duchamp, Gertrude Stein and others. (July) FYI: FSG will concurrently publish the first full-scale biography of Loy, Becoming Modern (Forecasts, May 6). A fictionalized treatment of Loy's life can be found in Albert J. Guerard's novel The Hotel in the Jungle (Baskerville, Forecasts, Apr. 15).
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (April 8, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374525072
• ISBN-13: 978-0374525071
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #92,833 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The most neglected talent of the century., July 2, 1998

By 

[e-mail] (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems of Mina Loy (Hardcover)

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.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars If you like T.S. Eliot..., February 16, 2009

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J. Blackhorse (TX, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems of Mina Loy (Paperback)

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.

7 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a must for poets, January 2, 2004

By 

Film8mm "igottahavemypops" (brew city, WI) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems of Mina Loy (Paperback)

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.