Mina Loy Books

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.

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.

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 Miller has taken examples from numerous unpublished manuscripts, so Cultures of Modernism is a find for those working specifically on these poets as well.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!

Engrossing fictional portrait of the strange marginal surrealist Richard Oelze as viewed through Mina Loy's friendship and scrutinizing curiosity of him.

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.

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.

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.

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. Its scenes are so vivid, in fact, that a recent novelization (unauthorized) of it has appeared and is receiving all the wonderful reviews that rightfully belong to Burke's book (see Logue).

I never liked epistolary romances but I found myself fully immerse into this one. I know Carolyn Burke's biography is a lot deeper than Logue's but here, and only here you find yourself completely involved in this intimate exchange. I cought myself reading in a different internal voice Mina and Jack's letters, a rare feeling of guilt and curiosity as if I had found someone else's mail, I could not stop reading it.

A beautiful and heartrending tale of love, friendship and tragedy. I was at first disappointed at Arthur Cravan, the shadowy subject of the novel, not appearing more frequently; by comparison Jack Johnson`s boxing career occupies a more important place. However the second part of the work, leading to its tragic finale, more than makes up for this initial disappointment. The pain of loss, especially the loss of a soul-mate as important to Mina Loy as Cravan was, is so realistically portrayed as to make this book unforgettable to the reader of any sensitivity whatsoever. Antonia Logue`s fictional conclusion, in which she has Cravan still alive in 1946, his existence unknown to Mina his wife due to the death of Johnson in a car accident (the boxer was hastening to inform Mina of her husband`s existence after his disappearance at sea in 1918), is arguably even more tragic than the doubtless reality of his having drowned in 1918; Mina remaining forever in ignorance of the truth. For someone who has come to love Cravan also for all he represents, this book is a godsend. I recommend it to all who wish to discover more about this remarkable man, the nephew of Oscar Wilde. May readers of "Shadow-Box" resolve to rectify the ignorance of Cravan, still today, in the English-speaking world, when he remains such a well-known and time-honoured name in the annals of French literature!

"Shadow Box" has received quite mixed reviews: some positive; others critical of its reliance on a biography of Mina Loy by Carolyn Burke. It overall "suffers" (if such be the word)from a failing critics find in modern, especially UK (by extension Ireland)literature: a reliance on already-established characters and history. Apart from those possible faults, I found the book interesting and well-written. Being unaware of Loy, and only vaguely having heard of Arthur Cravan, I found their characters believable;their epoch and milieu in which they lived colourfully-drawn. I do know something of Jack Johnson. The boxing scenes, the hostility Johnson received when entering the ring, were strong. The author has, apparently, never been an actual boxing fan. Her descriptions of the sport's technical aspects were thus impressive. Boxers fought differently then.

I second the sentiments of the New York Times reviewer ' the anecdotes here, many of which seem merely to have been cribbed from Carolyn Burke's recent biography of Loy, read more like a book report than a reinvention of the events and people portrayed"

Mina Loy lead a fascinating, adventurous life. That this novel captures much of it in such rich, well-researched detail is due, however, not to the meticulous research of Logue, but to the scholar who wrote the biography upon which the novel is based. Shadow-Box is good because it is a novelization (unauthorized) of Carolyn Burke's Becoming Modern. Why not read the original?