A Mod Orpheus

by Geoffrey Lokke

Poem Strip: Including an Explanation of the Afterlife

by Dino Buzzati, translated from the Italian by Marina Harss

New York Review Books, 224 pp., $22.95, April 2026, 9798896230007

Dino Buzzati’s erotic, rambling, and highly associative Poem Strip, recently translated from Italian and reissued by New York Review Books for their comics series, is a dreamlike graphic novel that was composed and first published the late 1960s. The book, which resembles few other comics from this or any period, is unequivocally a product of its time. Buzzati, who was also a journalist and a painter, graciously namechecks in his acknowledgments a number of his inspirations, including the German expressionist F. W. Murnau, the architect Ernesto Rogers, and Federico Fellini, whose modernist works he references and reimagines throughout the volume.

Poem Strip is quite recognizably set in Fellini’s languid and commodified Italy; in fact, it often seems to presage the filmmaker’s subsequent fantasy City of Women (1980) in both form and content. But this is also the Italy of Michelangelo Antonioni, whose films made with the poet Tonino Guerra have remained profound studies in alienation felt in the wake of the country’s miraculous postwar redevelopment that began in the 1950s. Notably, Italy was on the precipice of another generational conflict, the Years of Lead, marked by waves of terrorist violence from across the political spectrum, which inadvertently provided a real-world climax to the latent combustibility of bourgeois festival films during this period.

In light of Buzzati’s pedigree as a journalist—he worked for Corriere della Sera for many years—Poem Strip, a vision of disaffection in the face of American-style “prosperity,” can be viewed as a study of its political moment: it is difficult at times not to read the cataclysm of the war and the coming turmoil into these pages and the mythopoeic underworld traversed throughout the book. But it can also read as embarrassingly personal, like Chris Ware’s thinly veiled reflections through his own experiments in fiction.

An exploration of desire, control, and corruption, Poem Strip primarily retells the tragedy of Orpheus and Eurydice. Here, Orfi, a singer, watches from his window as a woman resembling Eura, his recently disappeared lover, enters a low-rise building through an unmarked door. He immediately follows her across the street and down below. Like the haunted (and haunting) rooms in Resnais and Robbe-Grillet’s Last Year at Marienbad (1961), the underground brothel presents a world of seduction without any promise of joy. The young man meets a crumpled tan jacket, seemingly the one he had just been wearing, which acts as the owner of the establishment. In a nineteenth-century turn, the coat serves as Orfi’s double, a favored doppelganger, a vision of a possible future. The garment eventually listens to the young man sing, and it is this reflexive object that allows him passage into further depths of this underworld.

Before doing so, however, the coat offers Orfi, who is in equal-parts a rock star and a wide-eyed Parsifal, a succession of beautiful women—including his beloved Eura. While underground, Orfi sings for large crowds that gather and swarm around him. He looks very much of the era—a shaggy-haired mod in a loose-fitting white shirt, perhaps a young Michel Polnareff or David Hemmings in Antonioni and Guerra’s Blow-Up (1966). The women in Buzzati’s crowds are almost exclusively naked or abstracted away into hills of cascading curves or nipples in the sky.

Other bodies are occasionally on view. There is a vision of a war early on, in which a group of camouflaged soldiers are seen marching together. Eventually, a shadowy figure shows Orfi a hidden reality of bodies that have been buried underground, living corpses of all ages and sexes, a scene that halfway acknowledges the casual misogyny or unbridled horniness that Buzatti both depicts and revels in. Notably, one of the most affecting moments is written and drawn from a female perspective and concerns a woman living in fear of being randomly attacked in her own home and skinned alive (and, in turn, being reduced to her skin). But the moment is fleeting and such a short sequence cannot amount to a sustained commentary on Buzzati’s own fantasies or reductions.

Buzzati also seems interested in how bodies interact with and are repurposed in different environments. Towards the end of Orfi’s journey, a series of file cabinets, stretching to the sky, quite suddenly become apartment blocks, which in turn change into towering locomotives about to whisk away the many dozens of women among whom Orfi has been searching. Orfi finds Eura and they attempt to flee, running past and seemingly into the gigantic axles and gears of the trains above. These transmogrified buildings and structures recall both the earlier allusions to Ernesto Rogers, whose Rationalist architecture redefined Italy’s urban landscape. Buzzati appears to be arguing that the outward image of progress has no psychic or human corollary with bodies lost among the rapid mechanization and quasi-scientific redevelopment of Italian society. At a distance, Buzzati typically draws humans as scrawls resembling tally marks, raw statistics for later processing.

The book is a propulsive read, given most pages consist of a single panel with Buzzati’s clipped prose or distinctly modernist, cut-up verse. Many of the episodes are built around the songs that Orfi performs, vignettes about conspiracy, paranoia, and what might lie beyond our senses, parallel to our conceptions of the world. Buzzati’s words at times simply recapitulate his drawings, and, on the odd occasion, his language and images have the effect of rendering each other redundant. In these moments the book feels formally didactic, even educational, as if Buzzati was attempting to demonstrate with his Poem Strip that a comic could in fact operate like lyric poetry, not unlike early American filmmakers with similar ambitions, such as Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler.

The dilemma with which Poem Strip explicitly leaves the reader, in an Eyes Wide Shut sort of way, is whether or not this journey has all been a dream. Buzzati methodically entwines and conflates Orfi’s experience of the underworld with the different ballads he sings for the denizens he encounters. But were any of these episodes memories from a past life? And do these dreams offer any vision of the future? In the closing sequence, we are presented landscapes with impossible figures and enfleshed structures reminiscent of Dalí and de Chirico, through which Buzzati attempts to suddenly transcend this discourse and its (however knowingly) adolescent fantasia of lust and exploitation. But in dismissing his own tendency to understand the world through storytelling and individuated selves, Buzzati oddly seems to call into question the value of the book that we just read and that he himself had painstakingly brought into existence.

Geoffrey Lokke is Film and Media Editor at The Periodical.