Transcendental Factory

by Karla Kelsey

ISBN: 9781959708100

Published: 2024

Poet Karla Kelsey’s lyric-documentary rendezvous with iconoclastic writer and visual artist Mina Loy (1882–1966) invents a new form for engaging a life. Known for the poetry she published in avant-garde magazines, Loy also wrote novels, stories, plays, and genre-bending philosophy, while painting, creating assemblages out of trash, and designing lamps for her Paris boutique. Though Loy was at the center of several modernist milieus—her friends and fans included Djuna Barnes, Constantin Brâncuși, Marcel Duchamp, and Gertrude Stein—nearly all of her visual art has been lost and much of her writing has only been published posthumously or remains in manuscript. Reminiscent of the poetic-biographical strategies of such works as Nathalie Léger’s Suite for Barbara Loden, Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson, and Robert Duncan’s The H.D. Book, Karla Kelsey’s novel of Loy’s life creates a resonating space for the lost and undocumented. Combining experimental biography with fiction and fact,...