Coffee Stains On My Books is a bilingual poetry collection by Italian author Stefania Lucchetti, including original colour illustrations by Italian illustrator Gianluca Biscalchin. Coffee Stains On My Books invites readers on a journey of self-discovery, introspection, and emotional resonance. Stefania Lucchetti intertwines everyday experiences with classical references, creating poems that explore the nuances of human relationships, transformative connections, and the imperfections of life.
Each page draws you deeper into a world where imagination, literature, philosophy, and mythology converge, offering a unique perspective on life’s complexities. Stefania’s exploration of love, loss, and reflection provides a tender yet powerful lens for reflecting about life with honesty and grace. [NOTE: Coffee Stains On My Books is the self published English edition of the Italian book "Macchie di caffè sui miei libri" published by a traditional publisher]
Coffee Stains On My Books is a bilingual poetry collection by Italian author Stefania Lucchetti, including original colour illustrations by Italian illustrator Gianluca Biscalchin. Coffee Stains On My Books invites readers on a journey of self-discovery, introspection, and emotional resonance. Stefania Lucchetti intertwines everyday experiences with classical references, creating poems that explore the nuances of human relationships, transformative connections, and the imperfections of life.
Each page draws you deeper into a world where imagination, literature, philosophy, and mythology converge, offering a unique perspective on life’s complexities. Stefania’s exploration of love, loss, and reflection provides a tender yet powerful lens for reflecting about life with honesty and grace. [NOTE: Coffee Stains On My Books is the self published English edition of the Italian book "Macchie di caffè sui miei libri" published by a traditional publisher]
I hid within myself
to be neither seen nor heard
until I could no longer find myself.
Hestia welcomed me in her hearth,
and I yielded to her embrace.
I found a home in her comfort.
I learned to rest
while tirelessly caring for others.
But now the wind blows,
the tides rise,
I hear Artemis whistle
I see Athena polishing her shield,
I feel the graceful steps of Aphrodite
and Hekate summons me on moonlit nights.
Cautiously, I will re-enter the world,
with the wary fear of one who doubts her trust.
Yet, within me
burns the resolve of a soul reborn.
We are about to see much new work from poet Stefania Lucchetti. Coffee Stains On My Books is but one of several bilingual collections of her poetry coming out before the end of year. Featuring both the Italian and English versions of her poems, Lucchetti's book is a brilliant and very welcome addition to the current poetry landscape. The multilingual and, thus, diversely musical registers of her writing serve as stunning vehicles for her searching, vulnerable, and emotionally penetrating verses.
As a translator, albeit of her own work, Lucchetti faces that ubiquitous challenge of all translators of poetry--the negotiation between preserving the music or the meaning. Setting any pair of Italian and English renderings of her poems alongside one another, the reader can clearly see those instances in which rhyme or metrical precision was lost in translation out of deference to image and thought. Still, Lucchetti's success in creating two gorgeous, resonate iterations of each piece is a staggering accomplishment. While the poet and speaker may be one mind, we understand each as a complex multiplicity of insights and endeavors to understand the world and self.
Lucchetti is skilled at writing from two related but often contradictory poetic vantage points. The first is the position of the uncertain wanderer, the speaker grounded in the immediacy of a narrative situation that demands inquiry and reflection. Questions are dynamic characters in these poems as the speaker searches to understand how she might interpret an experience or how she herself might be legible when read alongside a relationship or even mythological allusion (Hera, Hades, Medusa, etc.). Many of these questions go unanswered, but the consciousness of a pathway to critical self-awareness makes these poems relatable to any reader in search of the right ways to navigate their own realities.
The second poetic perspective Lucchetti's speaker takes is that of lyrical wisdom. Brilliant short poems like "Schrodinger's Cat," for instance, feature a much more confident speaker whose crisp critiques and metaphorical associations between a figure and literal referent demonstrate the poet's elegant capacity for artful insight and philosophical layering.
In short, Lucchetti's Coffee Stains On My Books is a sharp collection by a poet as at home in English as she is in Italian. A skillful writer and careful translator, Lucchetti is a poet to pay close attention to as her books continue to emerge before the close of 2025.