The URI Center of Humanities Subvention Grant will contribute important production costs to Prof. Peter Covino’s forthcoming book, What Sex Is Death, Selected Poems of Dario Bellezza, which recently won the 2024 University of Wisconsin Press Poetry in Translation Prize. The book is the first comprehensive English translation of poems by the prizewinning, openly gay Italian poet, novelist, and playwright Dario Bellezza (1944-1996), who died a premature death of AIDS-related illness. The poetry collection represents a major comparativist contribution to late 20th-century Italian and Anglophone literature, while enriching the history and discourse related to the legacy of Dario Bellezza’s bold poetics and LGBTQ+ activism. Over the course of a twenty-five-year publishing career, Bellezza published more than twenty books including eight full-length poetry collections. His notable prizes include the Viareggio Prize for Morte segreta (Secret Death, 1976) and the Montale Prize for lifetime poetic achievement for L’avversario (The Adversary 1994). The sheer variety of forms, from epigram to brash love-lyric to sustained political narrative, coupled with the fervor of Bellezza’s voice, make a compelling argument for his lasting importance among the best poets of the second half of the twentieth century.