The lost lunar Baedeker

Mina Loy, Mina Loy

There was a time when it was common to couple Mina Loy's name with that of W. C. Williams or Marianne Moore: her advanced contemporaries considered her a literary and artistic genius - a descendant of Sappho by way of Emily Dickinson. But the public was scandalized by her work, and some critics openly scorned it. Not only were her Futurist-inspired techniques unlike anything most readers had encountered before, but her subjects - procreation, parturition, prostitution, suicide, addiction, retardation - were considered shocking even by some modernists. Mina Loy vanished from the literary scene just as dramatically as she arrived on it, and for most of the century her bold experiments have remained a well-kept secret. But in recent years Loy's work has been discovered by a new generation of poets and critics, and has begun to surface in revisionist anthologies. What has been needed is...

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