Karla Kelsey
Transcendental Factory: For Mina Loy
$20.00 | November 2024 | ISBN 978-1-959708-10-0
In stock
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, Transcendental Factory elevates networks, constellations, and tracings over conventional chronology.
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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. Transcendental Factory is a book I will return to again and again, and I’ll find it on my shelf between Marie Darrieussecq’s Being Here Is Everything and Patrik Ouředník’s Europeana.
—Danielle Dutton
Karla Kelsey’s Transcendental Factory invites us into 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.” Kelsey “draws” Loy’s life “into [her] body,” and their I’s entangle and disentangle “to invent [themselves] out of what is at [their] disposal,” out of “fabric, line, language, gesture,” while the two of them are surrounded by “a circumference of time.” And so, we leave Transcendental Factory mesmerized, not only by Loy’s person and art, but also by Kelsey’s enviable adoration for and commitment to her subject, a gentle care all her own that leads us “to bosom, sacred heart, solar plexus, guts.”
—Poupeh Missaghi
This is a novel of the narrator’s being present to the figure, Mina Loy, through the evidence of the archive; and it is a work of what’s missing of life-story and art, which the documents of the archive attest to. It is also a feminist critique of the systems of valuation through which much of Loy’s art disappears. In its attention to period-style ornamentation and the extinction of creatures, it is likewise a work of eco-poetics that critically implicates varieties of modernisms. Through its imbrications of life-story, art object, temporality, and site—including the archival site in which the living poet-novelist, Karla Kelsey, 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
Karla Kelsey’s beautifully written poet’s novel replicates the loose structure of Mina Loy’s autobiographical writing—“severely fragmented by time, by unfinishing,” yet interconnected with strings of o’s and dashes, carefully crafted like strings of jewelry. Part chronicle of Loy’s life, part scholarly diary, it explores how the experience of being immersed in Loy’s archive unleashes an experience of becoming, shaped by the desire to reach for the tantalizing past of the modernist era. The initial ekphrastic focus on the aura of Loy’s photographs triggers a slipping underneath the glossy surface and a blurring of subjectivities as the reader-narrator is drawn into the “transcendental factory” of Loy’s writing: “Transcribing Loy’s manuscripts I write what she writes, draw her language into my body.” Yet the slippage from “Loy” to “Mina,” and from the narrator’s I to Mina’s, also generates a reflection on how autobiographic subjectivity is constructed as “[w]hat might be ‘I’ explodes the moment thought slips into language.”
—Yasna Bozhkova, author of Between Worlds: Mina Loy’s Aesthetic Itineraries