Known in his native Italy and around the world as a novelist, short story writer, painter and poet, Dino Buzzati took a late-in-life leap into unknown territory in creating Poem Strip (Poema a Fumetti), which is a fascinating blend of all his skills in one work.  Originally published in 1969 when Buzatti was 63 years old, equal parts epic poem, surrealist drawings, and graphic novel, Poem Strip is structured around a contemporary reworking of the Orpheus myth – that contains at least a nod to the Jean Cocteau film – with Orpheus (Orfi) here rendered as a rock star set on rescuing his love, Eurydice (Eura) from the underworld.  Buzzati builds out from this core with a series of stream of consciousness meditations on sex and death – and bureaucracy – depicted as surrealities composed of decaying cityscapes, rotting aristocracies, mutated technologies and a great deal of feminine pulchritude.  So, yes, very much the work of an unreformed Italian male of his time, but certainly formally inventive and thematically interesting, nonetheless.

We still have new copies of this 2009 edition translated by Marina Harss with great hand lettering by none other than Rich Tommaso!