Poem Strip

A New York Review Books Original

Dino Buzzati is a luminary of the mid-twentieth-century Italian literary avant-garde and the author of The Tartar Steppe, a modern classic. He was also an accomplished visual artist. Poem Strip, from 1968, unites his various talents in a pioneering graphic novel that relocates the story of Orpheus and Eurydice to a ghostly version of modern Milan. The Orpheus figure is a guitarist and Eurydice is Eura, who is no sooner seen and desired than lost. Her lover follows her into an underworld of temptation and delusion, at once bar, strip joint, hall of mirrors, horror show, and tunnel of love. He tells stories to wake the dead–outlandish tales that open up strange metaphysical perspectives within the self–and returns with a precious secret that may be everything or nothing.