The subtle interplay of the verbal and the visual in Mina Loy's poetry assured her place in experimental writing during the twenties. The younger generation of expatriate writers admired her involvement in avant-garde movements and her European sensibility. Born in London and trained as an artist in Munich and Paris at the turn of the century, she later went to New York, where she associated with the group of poets whose work appeared in Alfred Kreymborg's magazine Others during World War I. When she returned to Paris with her daughters in 1923, Robert McAlmon published Lunar Baedecker , a collection of her poems. (The misspelling of "Baedeker" was McAlmon's.) As the widow of poet-boxer Arthur Cravan, she had considerable contact with the Dadaists and Surrealists, who saw Cravan as a Dada hero. Her friendships with Marcel Duchamp, Gertrude Stein, and Djuna Barnes were long-standing; in Paris she came to know...