“Selective / perspective”: Mina Loy and the female homeless

This article examines the quandaries of representation of the female homeless in Mina Loy’s poetry produced while she was living and working in increasing obscurity in the Bowery, New York City (1937–1953). While Loy’s Bowery work often engages the male homeless or homelessness as a general category, there are several texts in this opus where Loy strategically focuses on female homelessness, its cognitive and material spaces, and ambivalent symbolic status. This article discusses the poetic sequence Compensations of Poverty (1942–1949) and reconstructs the historical context for female homelessness in New York City of the time. It reassesses the complex ontological and symbolic status of the female homeless and female figures of precarity in Loy’s text, and the author’s strategic use of enforced dialogue with the reader to layer ontology with affective experience and ethics relating to homelessness, dispossession, and disposability.