Little Dividing Doors in the Mind

Karla Kelsey

Noemi Press

<p>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 Brâncu¿i, 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, Transcendental Factory elevates networks, constellations, and tracings over conventional chronology. || "In dazzling, devious prose, Karla Kelsey has written a brilliant novel from inside and outside Mina Loy -- a novel that is also a poem, a dictionary, a historical compendium, an elegant archival encounter. A book I will return to again and again." ­--DANIELLE DUTTON || "... a feminist critique of the systems of valuation through which much of Loy's art disappears. Through its imbrications of life-story, art object, temporality, and site-including the archival site in which the living poet-novelist labors-lyric imagination and critical art practice meet in a magisterial testimony of affinity, grieving, and connection to what remains and what furthers." --CARLA HARRYMAN || "Part chronicle of Loy's life, part scholarly diary, it explores how the experience of being immersed in Loy's archive un-leashes an experience of becoming, shaped by the desire to reach for the tantalizing past of the modernist era." -- YASNA BOZHKOVA || "...a gorgeous experience of intimacy, introducing us to an 'azure, blue glass gem, enamel' Mina Loy the way she had often thought of herself: 'a form of glass. Refractory, illuminated by the sun.'" --POUPEH MISSAGHI</p>

Transcendental Factory

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Books by Karla Kelsey

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Karla Kelsey. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Little Dividing Doors in the Mind

Transcendental Factory