“That Love is all there is/Is all we know of Love” (Emily Dickinson)
Photo: The author with her husband Marcello (Vienna, 2024)
Afternoons of Suspended Love is a book which tells a tale of love and passion in a long term marriage.
It is a bilingual (Italian and English side by side text) poetic journey through the seasons of marital love – a collection which explores couple life in its deepest truth: made of everyday gestures, shared challenges, and an intimacy that renews itself. With fluid, warm, and musical writing, the author guides us through the suspended afternoons of two lovers who, in the heart of a mature marriage, still know how to seek and choose each other.
Here, love is not idealized but lived: between disenchantment and wonder, between effort and passion, between skin and soul. It is a hymn to the quiet strength of devotion, to the beauty of small things, to the courage to transform time into complicity.
A book that, with a whisper of eroticism, speaks to the heart of those who love and those who have loved, to those who believe that true love does not burn out but transforms every day, together.
LOVE IN POETRY
I was, for a long time, reluctant to speak about love.
This hesitation stems from many reasons and personal experiences. Above all, it comes from the belief that love is such a personal and complex journey that speaking about it has always felt inadequate and limiting to me.
Poetry, however, is the ultimate vehicle for love, just as it is for imperfection.
So, after a period in which I wrestled with my own reluctance, I reopened within myself the doors to the possibility of thinking about and telling the story of love.
The featured photo shows me with my husband, Marcello, during a wonderful family trip to Vienna in 2024. It was taken right after a small argument.
You would not see this from the photo.
Two different desires, simple in their essence, clashed in that moment. Yet from that small fracture was born a memory we now hold dear. With time, regarding that particular matter, he came to understand my point of view and I his. We love this photo precisely because it tells more than what can be seen: the disagreement was real, but so is the love that shines through in the image.
In this case, the quarrel was minor, truly insignificant, but as the reader can imagine, after so many years together there have been many other fractures, some not so trivial and not so easily healed, even with time.
Love is not simple. I often write about it in my books and poems, because it is a living, changing substance that feeds on contrasting emotions.
Love that lasts over time does not live only on intense and overwhelming feelings; it is built also through contrasts, silences, misunderstandings that are overcome, and fractures that are sometimes small and everyday, sometimes vast and seemingly irreparable.
Love endures when there is a reason to begin again each day, and that reason must be sought and renewed, every day.
How to Hold on to Love
But how can we hold on to love? How can we make it last over time?
There are no magic formulas, but perhaps there exists a subtle thread that connects everything: the ability to find in a relationship, and in the other person, not only what makes us feel good, but also what challenges us, what compels us to grow, and to see life from a wider perspective.
It is the ability to wake up each day and look at life — and relationships — with new eyes.
Love that endures over time is a mirror in which we see ourselves reflected, even when the image is not, and cannot be, always perfect.
That image does not speak of the absence of conflict, but of the choice to stay, to understand one another, to create threads of connection even on the most difficult days.
Poetry Is Cyberpunk by Stefania Lucchetti speaks of the search for identity, love, and soul in an age dominated by big data and digital dehumanization.
“Love is finding something you thought lost”
Exstract from “Love is not”, Stefania Lucchetti, Coffee Stains on My Books
You can also find other poems about love in Coffee Stains on My Books, the cartography of emotional existence in poetry.
Poetry is cyberpunk by Stefania Lucchetti speaks of the search for identity, love and soul in an age dominated by big data and digital dehumanization.