Mina Loy, 1882-1966
The Lost Lunar Baedeker (1996)
This collection of Loy’s work comes from all periods of her writing career, and is created from poems which she published in poetry magazines. She also wrote prose which included satire and commentary on Modernism. Her writing was considered scandalous by some because subjects such as prostitution, addition, and suicide appeared in her poems in a way that was shocking even to the forward-thinking Modernists.
In 1944, Kenneth Rexroth, a leader of the San Francisco Renaissance, called her extremely exceptional, while William Carlos Williams said that “Mina Loy was endowed from birth with a first-rate intelligence and a sensibility which has plagued her all her life facing a shoddy world.” The fact that her work has often been overlooked by critics is inexcusable according to these men who were critics and poets.