With the publication of Roger Conover’s editions of The Last Lunar Baedeker (1982) and his revised and comprehensively annotated The Lost Lunar Baedeker (1996), Loy’s literary legacy came, convulsively, back to life. In the last decades of the twentieth century, critics started to probe modernism’s margins, questioning received histories of literary communities and recovering forgotten figures. For too long, she was overlooked, blighted by the critical amnesia that commonly affects women writers, and that is endemic in treatments of Loy’s elusive, experimental ilk. Lunar Baedeker and Timetables corrected some of the 1923 edition’s errors, but introduced others. In 1958, a new edition of her poems was published under Jonathan Williams’s Jargon imprint. Her first poetry collection, Lunar Baedecker, was published by Robert McAlmon’s Contact Editions in 1923, its title misspelled. Between 19, her work was published in magazines and periodicals on both sides of the Atlantic, including Camera Work, Trend, Rogue, Others, Blind Man, The Dial, The Little Review, Contact, Playboy, transatlantic review, Pagany, Accent and View, and featured in anthologies such as the 1925 Contact Collection of Contemporary Writers and in Kreymborg’s 1930 Lyric America: An Anthology of American Poetry. In her lifetime, what renown she attained derived predominantly from her activities as a poet. Nowhere else are these distinctions so bewitchingly blurred as they are in this novel. Though much of her writing rehearses the contours of her biography, her predilection for imposture, anagram and factual distortion make slippery the lines between autobiography and fiction. Slipping between textual avatars, she remakes herself as Imna Loy, Goy, Ova, Sophia and, in Insel, Mrs. For the rest of us, capturing Loy is neither possible nor even advisable.

Cut short by his mysterious disappearance that same year, their romance was absolute. I am at ease” (“Excerpts from ‘Colossus’ ”). On the event of their marriage in 1918, the Dada poet-pugilist Arthur Cravan declared: “Now I have caught you. There have been many Loys more are emerging. Though the inventory device might be hackneyed, the listing of multiple cities, movements, artistic colocutors and art practices remains the only way to convey the multiplicities that characterize her formation and her work. It has become something of a commonplace to populate the opening of any portrait of Loy with globe-wrapping litanies. Leaving New York in 1953, she made her last works in the barely nascent art town of Aspen Loy’s burial there in 1966 left her body at the site of yet another significant episode in the history of the transatlantic avant-gardes. She engaged with these art scenes neither as onlooker nor acolyte but as an acutely critical cross-media artist. Though the stamps in her passport furnish the coordinates to map the development of twentieth-century art, Loy was not just fortuitously “present” in these locations at the zero hour of their modernist fluorescence. Relocating finally from Europe to New York in 1936, she was the unofficial artist-in-residence on the Bowery when New York was inaugurated as capital city of the postwar art world.

Between those dates, she was resident of Jugendstil Munich (1900), Futurist Florence (1907–1916), Dada-enfevered New York (1916–1917) and Surrealist Paris (1923–1936), making interstitial appearances in Paris (1903–1906), Mexico (1918), Weimar Berlin (1922) and Freud’s Vienna (1922), among other places. Born Mina Gertrude Lowy, a self-nominated “Anglo-mongrel,” in London in 1882, Mina Loy died an American citizen in 1966.

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