The modernist poet Mina Loy often drew on personal experience in her writing, but these biographical aspects are coded and disguised in her complex poetry. Nevertheless many critics have attempted to relate the assumed identities of Loy's writing to the facts of her life. Informed by recent feminist scholarship on autobiography and engaging with a range of criticism on Loy, criticism that considers both the feminist and the racial aspects of her writing, this article considers how Loy's poetic sequence Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose (1923-25) examines and transforms biographical material into feminist poetry. In this discussion the figure of the mother provides a useful frame for considering the relationship between the biographical impulse in reading Loy's writing and the autobiographical poetry that she writes. The representation of the maternal body in Anglo-Mongrels is explored and compared to accounts of language and the maternal body that feature in both Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1922) and Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914-15). What this analysis ultimately highlights is the role of the critic herself in constructing and reworking the self put forward in the discourse of autobiography.