The poet and visual artist Mina Loy has long had an underground reputation as an exemplary avant-gardist. Born in London of mixed Jewish and English parentage, and a much photographed beauty, she moved in the pivotal circles of international modernism-in Florence as Gertrude Stein's friend and Marinetti's lover, in New York as Marcel Duchamp's co-conspirator and Djuna Barnes's confidante, in Mexico with the greatest love, the notorious boxer-poet Arthur Cravan, in Paris with the Surrealists and Man Ray. Carolyn Burke's riveting, authoritative biography, Becoming Modern, brings this highly original and representative figure wonderfully alive, in the process giving us a new picture of modernism-and one woman's important contribution to it.