“That’s the difference between love & desire
Desire burns like a fire
Turning lust into ash
While love, well that lasts longer.”
That’s how Bandits & Lovebirds from Sean Stapelfeld begins. A simple yet enchanting cover reels in a reader’s attention and once you open the book to the first page, you know you have to read it until the very end. Sadly, you’ll end up wanting more.
Inspired by Poe, Harper Lee, and H.P. Lovecraft, Sean aspires to do to his readers what his inspirations did to him. He wants to be able to “provoke similar feelings inside of people the way these authors provoked emotions in me.” Even though he thought this was just one of those “live and die” dreams in our minds, those that never actually breathe and come true, his first book has been recently published. And so “like J.K. Rowling puts it, ‘Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?’”
By deciding to give his dream its soul and reason to breathe, Stapelfeld started writing each and every morning. Three months away, Bandits & Lovebirds was born into the literate world. And thus, this small yet strong book came into my bookworm hands because of a friend who knew Sean. Its pages carry deep feelings, similar to those evoked in the Japanese genre of three-line Haikus. Stapelfeld’s poems are short but they don’t fail at all to make us see and feel some sentiments that poems had never made us feel before. Personally I’m accustomed to poems with some sort of structure or rhythm, but Sean dared to go against this and I wound up enjoying it. All his verses seemed to carry along a love story with all its corners and rollercoasters. Some are really cute, some are intense, some are even a type of advice, others are so relatable that upon reading I felt quite cynical, and there were others that tackled some of society’s problems.
When I read this, the first two lines felt like something I’d heard before about consent, but the other too went way deeper into something that maybe the guy pressuring the girl isn’t exactly the villain, but is broken somewhere inside, emotionally speaking. On another poem, Stapelfeld tries to give advice to us gals and guys that try to “fix” people, and in another, the desire of the poetic voice could be love-related or against society.
Artists and writers have always been more in touch with their feelings, which is why what we produce is so intense and inspiring to others, which is why our arrangements of words blow people’s minds. This book I believe, encompasses many of those feelings since us artists generally wear our heart on our sleeves. When talking about his poems, Sean mentioned that “the entire book is one big story, one that you can understand if you have felt the love, the hurting, the pain you feel when you lose someone you care deeply for.” For now the future English major continues to enjoy the process of publishing and selling his first book; he continues to write each morning the material that could possibly make his second book come to life. You can find Bandits and Lovebirds by contacting Sean Stapelfeld through Facebook or his email: sean.stapelfeld@upr.edu.