Poem Strip: Including an Explanation of the Afterlife

By: Dino Buzzati

Published by New York Review of Books, 2026-04-14

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.