The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems of Mina Loy - Hardcover

Loy, Mina; Conover, Roger L.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374258724 ISBN 13: 9780374258726

Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1996

Synopsis

Gathers poems by the early twentieth-century avant garde poet, and offers a brief profile of the enigmatic writer

About this title

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 the Back Cover:

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 a reliable text of the essential Loy poems. To assemble The Lost Lunar Baedeker, Roger Conover has rescued Loy's poems and prose works from the Dada magazines and other ephemeral publications where they first appeared. All of Loy's notorious Futurist and feminist satires are included, as are many poems from her Paris and New York periods, the complete cycle of "Love Songs", and several previously unknown texts. Detailed notes accompany the text.

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0374258724
• ISBN 13: 9780374258726
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 236
• Editor: Conover Roger L.