[Note: Januzzi provides an exhaustive annotated bibliography of Loy's published works, "in order of appearance, including artworks in reproduction and significant posthumous publications," as well as a magnificently comprehensive bibliography of critical writings on Loy. It is from the latter that we have drawn the following three excerpts, beginning in 1980 with Kouidis's book-length study of Loy. Note, however, that Januzzi's critical bibliography goes back as far as 1914.]

1) Virginia M. Kouidis, Mina Loy: American Modernist Poet. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1980.

"Chapter two, 'The Modernist Vision,' explores the ways in which Loy's poems were notorious not just because they were sexually frank but also because they were 'first-hand assimilations of current structural and technical experiments by European painters and writers, especially the Futurists.' . . . Kouidis gives an extended reading of the 'Love Songs,' which she refers to as a 'kaleidoscopic' long poem, a 'Futurist collage of thirty-four perspectives on failed love,' a 'surrealist link' forged between 'sexuality and the psyche.' She situates the poem in a biographical context, but sees in it a Bergsonian 'organic relation between subject and structure.' Kouidis also explores some of the similarities of this work to Eliot's 'Prufrock,' bringing out the mutual ancestor of the 'I' in each poem: Laforgue's Pierrot." (Januzzi, 566-67)

2) Virginia M. Kouidis, "Prison into Prism: Emerson's 'Many-Colored Lenses' and the Woman Writer of Early Modernism," The Green American Tradition: Essay and Poems for Sherman Paul, ed. H. Daniel Peck. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1989, 115-34.

"Kouidis argues that Loy 'most tantalizingly hints at an Emersonian ancestry in Love Songs to Joannes (1915-1917), a thirty-four poem collage of love's failure' that 'spatializes the traditional narrative of failed love' by refiguring the failure repeatedly and 'kaleidoscopically' as "pieces of Coloured glass"'; ML thus 'rewrites "Experience" in flamboyantly sexual,' compressed, fragmented modernist imagery." (Januzzi, 586)

3) Jacqueline Baught Brogan, Part of the Climate: American Cubist Poetry. Berkeley: U of California Press, 1991.

"[In 'Love Songs'] Brogan sees 'increased attention to the visual impact of the verse.' When the songs appeared in their entirety in 1917, they demonstrated an advance in technique: 'By song VII, for instance, Loy has introduced a series of dashes as signs for missing words, thereby inverting the cubist play in the visual medium when words are pasted or painted onto canvases as signs of themselves.' Thus the songs represent 'the first sustained American cubist poem to move beyond the relatively simple analysis of form to something more on the order of synthetic reintegration (25).'" (Januzzi, 592)