Lost Lunar Baedeker

Mina Loy was born in 1882, but has been perplexingly absent from British literary history. Pound, Moore and Williams valued her work, whilst British critics scorned it. Her futurist techniques and subject matters were considered shocking as she explored, sexual love, prostitution, suicide and addiction.She had all but vanished from the literary scene, until Carcanet introduced her work to British readers in 1985 in Roger Conover's The Last Lunar Baedeker, which recovered lost works from Dada archives and avant-garde magazines. In America she has been posthumously launched as the electric-age Blake and she has been translated in French and Italian; in the TLS Thom Gunn compared her to the great Augustan satirists. In 1997 Carcanet published The Lost Lunar Baedeker, a selection of her work edited by Roger L. Conover. Her collection defines the trajectory of her favoured company and geography - from Joyce in Paris in the 1920s to fellow destitutes in New York's Lower East Side in the 1940s. ROGER CONOVER is the senior editor at MIT Press, where he publishes books on art, architecture, modernism and theory. He is the author of many essays on Mina Loy and Arthur Cravan, whose biography he is writing.

"[Mina Loy] may now be launched on a posthumous career as the electric-age Blake."--Hugh Kenner, "The Washington Times" "Mina Loy has finally been admitted into 'the company of poets, ' the canon. As if she cared."--Thom Gunn, "The Times Literary Supplement"