The myth of Orpheus and Eurydice is retold with riotous ’60s flair in Dino Buzzati’s phantasmagorical graphic novel, a story with “shades of Fellini, shades of Dickens, [and] shades of the great Italian horror director Mario Bava” (Los Angeles Times).
There’s a certain street—via Saterna—in the middle of Milan that just doesn’t show up on maps of the city. Orfi, a wildly successful young singer, lives there, and it’s there that one night he sees his gorgeous girlfriend Eura disappear, “like a spirit,” through a little door in the high wall that surrounds a mysterious mansion across the way. Where has Eura gone? Orfi will have to venture with his guitar across the borders of life and death to find out.
Featuring the Ashen Princess, the Line Inspector, trainloads of Devils, Trudy, Valentina, and the Talking Jacket, Poem Strip—a pathbreaking graphic novel from the 1960s—is a dark and alluring investigation into mysteries of love, lust, sex, and death by Dino Buzzati, a master of the Italian avant-garde.
Dino Buzzati (1906–1972) studied law at the University of Milan and, at the age of twenty-two, went to work for the daily newspaper Corriere della Sera, where he remained for the rest of his life. He served in World War II as a journalist connected to the Italian navy and on his return published the book for which he is most famous, The Stronghold (NYRB Classics). A gifted artist as well as writer, Buzzati was the author of five novels and numerous short stories, as well as a popular children’s book, The Bears’ Famous Invasion of Sicily.
Marina Harss is a translator and dance writer based in New York City. She is the author of the biography The Boy from Kyiv: Alexei Ratmansky's Life in Ballet.
“I think I stumbled upon this on late-night TV when I was a kid: Donovan, playing himself, wandering through a neo-Caligari lava-lamp world of writhing Barbara Steeles and Sophia Lorens in search of love and justice and groove. I'm happy to see it's on again.” —Daniel Handler
“[A] decisive contribution to the establishment of the graphic novel as a proper literary genre…. Poem Strip is exhilarating in its inventiveness and highly provocative. Enticing and terrifying in turns, it reinvented the whole concept of the comic book by merging experimental graphics, erotically charged illustration, avant-garde poetry, psychedelic songwriting, and occult fiction.” —Valentina Zanca, Words Without Borders
"A sumptuous meditation on the ways in which death gives life meaning.... Although its psychedelic palette points to its '60s creation, the images are still strikingly modern and erotic." —Publishers Weekly
"Comics have been described as movies on paper, and this one reads like a rock ’n’ roll-sexploitation-fantasy-occult midnight cult favorite." —AV Club
The myth of Orpheus and Eurydice is retold with riotous ’60s flair in Dino Buzzati’s phantasmagorical graphic novel, a story with “shades of Fellini, shades of Dickens, [and] shades of the great Italian horror director Mario Bava” (Los Angeles Times).
There’s a certain street—via Saterna—in the middle of Milan that just doesn’t show up on maps of the city. Orfi, a wildly successful young singer, lives there, and it’s there that one night he sees his gorgeous girlfriend Eura disappear, “like a spirit,” through a little door in the high wall that surrounds a mysterious mansion across the way. Where has Eura gone? Orfi will have to venture with his guitar across the borders of life and death to find out.
Featuring the Ashen Princess, the Line Inspector, trainloads of Devils, Trudy, Valentina, and the Talking Jacket, Poem Strip—a pathbreaking graphic novel from the 1960s—is a dark and alluring investigation into mysteries of love, lust, sex, and death by Dino Buzzati, a master of the Italian avant-garde.
Creators
Dino Buzzati (1906–1972) studied law at the University of Milan and, at the age of twenty-two, went to work for the daily newspaper Corriere della Sera, where he remained for the rest of his life. He served in World War II as a journalist connected to the Italian navy and on his return published the book for which he is most famous, The Stronghold (NYRB Classics). A gifted artist as well as writer, Buzzati was the author of five novels and numerous short stories, as well as a popular children’s book, The Bears’ Famous Invasion of Sicily.
Marina Harss is a translator and dance writer based in New York City. She is the author of the biography The Boy from Kyiv: Alexei Ratmansky's Life in Ballet.
“I think I stumbled upon this on late-night TV when I was a kid: Donovan, playing himself, wandering through a neo-Caligari lava-lamp world of writhing Barbara Steeles and Sophia Lorens in search of love and justice and groove. I'm happy to see it's on again.” —Daniel Handler
“[A] decisive contribution to the establishment of the graphic novel as a proper literary genre…. Poem Strip is exhilarating in its inventiveness and highly provocative. Enticing and terrifying in turns, it reinvented the whole concept of the comic book by merging experimental graphics, erotically charged illustration, avant-garde poetry, psychedelic songwriting, and occult fiction.” —Valentina Zanca, Words Without Borders
"A sumptuous meditation on the ways in which death gives life meaning.... Although its psychedelic palette points to its '60s creation, the images are still strikingly modern and erotic." —Publishers Weekly
"Comics have been described as movies on paper, and this one reads like a rock ’n’ roll-sexploitation-fantasy-occult midnight cult favorite." —AV Club
