POEMS ABOUT FEMALE IDENTITY, TRANSFORMATION AND HEALING FROM DIFFICULT TIMES: with a voice at once intimate and intellectual, Stefania Lucchetti gathers the substances of lived experience and life's imperfections - love and fracture, desire and memory, grief and metamorphosis - and submits them to the clarifying voice of poetry with classical echoes of mythology.
A bilingual poetry collection by award-winning Italian contemporary poet Stefania Lucchetti
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BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS
(Cover art: original drawing by Italian illustrator Gianluca Biscalchin)
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FEATURED in Reedsy Discovery List of the Best New Books - November 2025
Excerpt from the editorial reviews: "A fiercely talented, bilingual poet, Lucchetti is a musical genius of great depth and complexity... This is a book of searching, vulnerable, and emotionally penetrating verses".
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Coffee Stains on My Books is an award-winning bilingual poetry collection (English and Italian), accompanied by original colour illustrations, and conceived as a luminous encounter between language, art, and thought.
With a voice at once intimate and intellectual, Stefania Lucchetti gathers the substances of lived experience and life's imperfections - love and fracture, desire and memory, grief and metamorphosis - and submits them to the clarifying voice of poetry.
Classical echoes - myth, literature, and philosophy - move through the collection not as ornament, but as a deep structure of meaning. The author offers poems dedicated to mythology figures such as Penelope, Athena, Ulysses, Medusa, Hekate, Poseidon, Artemis and others to tell personal stories which are universal. The ancient world returns here as metaphor and mirror: a vocabulary for what exceeds us, for what remains unsolved in the heart, for what endures.
The book is enriched by the original illustrations of Italian artist Gianluca Biscalchin, whose visual language extends the poems' symbolic atmosphere, heightening their lyric tension and their sense of mystery.
Coffee Stains on My Books belongs to that rare tradition of poetry in which emotional precision and contemplative depth are inseparable: a work that invites the reader into attentiveness, into interpretive pleasure.
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Stefania Lucchetti is an Italian award-winning poet and essayist. Bilingual in Italian and English, she writes poetry of lyrical refinement and contemporary relevance.