There is something irredeemably human in the small, everyday error of a poorly placed cup – in the distraction that leaves a coffee stain on a page.
It is a trace, time that had the courage to settle, an invisible testimony of lived experience crossing the paper.
“Macchie di caffè sui miei libri” (available in English as“Coffee Stains on My Books”) the title of Stefania Lucchetti’s poetry collection published by Gruppo Albatros Il Filo, is in every way a poetic declaration. A stain is not always something to be corrected – it can be welcomed.
The book opens gently, almost on tiptoe, but with the strength of someone who has lived in shadow and turned it into words. Each poem is a variation on the theme of imperfection that reveals, of intimacy that endures. It is poetry that doesn’t impose itself, but offers itself -archetypal in language, contemporary in gaze. Thus, the desk becomes an altar, the book a living body, the stain a secular prayer. It is precisely at the point where coffee touches ink that the real story begins: one that doesn’t need to be perfect, but simply faithful to the emotions it conveys.
Stefania Lucchetti has a background in law and psychology, fields in which she has written for years. “Coffee Stains on My Books” marks her return to poetry, which she had set aside during adolescence, and it does so with the strength of someone who has come to understand silence. Her poems arise from a deep need for expression and become an almost countercultural invitation to inhabit the cracks, to remain within the folds of experience without the need for ready-made answers.
Stefania Lucchetti’s poetry seems designed to be lived in. It presents itself as a fogged mirror in which the reader is called to recognize themselves – not without effort. It is a writing that welcomes, that doesn’t impose a message but suggests a presence. For this reason, the ideal reader of her poetic voice is someone willing to pause, to get lost, to let themselves be questioned. She speaks to anyone who has known pain, absence, or a return. To those who understand that words don’t always resolve, but often accompany. This is a collection for those who have stopped searching for perfect answers and have begun listening to the questions.
In this way, the reader becomes the co-author of the work. It is the reader who completes the meaning, who decides where to linger, what to feel, what to let settle. Stefania Lucchetti offers no certainties—she offers pages where the gaze may rest when everything else seems to slip away. And it is precisely in this quiet, fragile space that connection is born.
Identity, motherhood, solitude, desire, rebirth—these themes weave through the collection like threads of an ancient tapestry, where every knot is a wound but also a point of resilience. Lucchetti’s poetics are in constant transformation: every pain becomes a threshold, every wound a passage.
Classical myth, in her writing, is a living code capable of naming emotions and inner postures of the feminine. Goddesses like Athena, Aphrodite, Hera, and Hecate descend from Olympus to inhabit the everyday, making the most personal experiences universal. Home, city, and body also become symbolic places—stages of being. The author’s style alternates between lyricism and poetic prose, broken phrases and continuous flows. Repetition becomes a magic formula, the archetype a mirror: it seeks an unfiltered truth that moves precisely because it is real.
Through several texts, we can trace an interpretive map of the entire collection. In the poem “Ariadne’s Thread,” for example, the classical archetype is rewritten by a wounded but aware voice:
“Why did you abandon me / when my purpose was fulfilled, / cast aside like the thread already used?”
Here, Ariadne is no longer the passive mythical helper but a consciousness demanding justice. She is the mother, the artist, the strategist—forgotten after having offered salvation. A quiet, collective protest against the marginalization of the feminine that creates and is then excluded from the narrative.
In “Hunger,” Lucchetti explores the body as a container of absences and unspoken needs:
“To avoid the pain of anguish / the only thing I feel is hunger…”
Hunger here is not just physical. It is hunger for gaze, for recognition, for meaning. In these lines, the poet addresses eating disorders without rhetoric, restoring to the body its fragility and its urgent need to be seen.
“Love and Chaos” explores motherhood beyond all idealization:
“I thought love walked straight, / but it moves and sways constantly…”
The mother is both spectator and protagonist of a love that unravels structures but creates life in its swaying. It is an ode to generative chaos, which Lucchetti recounts with tenderness and sincerity.
Finally, in “Schrödinger’s Cat,” poetry becomes ontological reflection:
“Do I exist without a spectator? / Do I exist if no one recognizes me?”
Identity needs to be seen in order to exist. A meditation on solitude, but also on intersubjectivity: the other as guarantor of our reality. Lucchetti, with a firm and vulnerable voice, reminds us that invisibility is one of the deepest forms of pain.
Lucchetti writes from a threshold. The threshold is always an uncomfortable, unstable place—but it is also the only place from which one can truly see: the everyday becomes symbol, myth slips into a maternal gesture, chaos births beauty. Her words are bridges, not shelters. It is poetry that doesn’t sugarcoat pain or make it aesthetically palatable. It walks through it. Illuminates it from within, without dressing it up as redemption.
One of the most fascinating features of the collection is the plurality of voices inhabiting it. Stefania Lucchetti does not write from a single lyrical self, but from a constellation of selves that alternate, overlap, and even contradict each other—just like in real life. There is the woman who has loved and lost, the weary but tender mother, the daughter who carries grief like a silent root, the professional who fights daily against expectations and invisibility.
Each poem is a point of view from a different incarnation of feminine identity. She is Penelope weaving and unweaving, Eve working “in secret,” Cassandra speaking and not being believed, Athena holding up the world but feeling her knees buckle. Lucchetti composes an inner chorus that does not scream in unison but vibrates in imperfect harmonies—and for that reason, it is true.
Stefania Lucchetti’s work opens a window onto a layered, vehement, untamed inner world. It is a voice that has long waited for the right moment to emerge, and now steps onto the literary stage with the courage of someone who has much to say.
Ultimately, coffee stains—like soul scars—are not to be erased: they become maps. Unintentional signs, perhaps, but precious ones. Stefania Lucchetti has left on these pages the emotional cartography of a life observed with radical honesty. Her verses pose questions that remain, that settle. In a time when words are often reduced to consumption, Lucchetti restores to poetry its highest task: to make us pause and reflect.
They are maps that remind us we have been – and still are – crossed through. If poetry is a language that cannot be silenced, then let it be the stain, not the perfect word, that guides us – because that is where the true journey begins.
Translation of an article in Italian language appeared on the cultural page of ANSA.it: https://www.ansa.it/pressrelease/cultura/2025/04/28/macchie-di-caffe-sui-miei-libri-la-cartografia-emotiva-dellesistenza-in-poesia_988526f7-77c7-431e-b90e-3de5f277a053.html
