• Poem Strip
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Poem Strip

Poem Strip

by Dino Buzzati, translated from the Italian by Marina Harss

$14.95
$0.00 $14.95
International Literature Italian Literature
Format

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.by Dino Buzzati, translated from the Italian by Marina Harss

Additional Book Information

Series: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 9781590173237
Pages: 224
Publication Date:

Praise

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

Buzzati was a master at transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary, fusing the world of nightmare with that of objective reality, and thus creating an ominous universe of ambiguous, allegorical dimensions.
—Columbia Dictionary of Modern European Literature

It is surprising how many forgotten authors have managed to survive in their short fiction rather than their novels, even though their full-length works received critical adulation upon publication. Dino Buzzati is obscure even by bibliophiles' standards, but it's important to include him here because he was an extraordinary writer.... Buzzati's greatest strength lay here, in a kind of Italian magical realism that heightened the simple and practical with seemingly fantastic elements.... His writing feels timeless.... Indeed, finding his work without paying a fortune for it is a labour of patience.
—The Independent (UK)

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

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