Peter Covino is a poet, translator, editor, and professor whose work connects queer desire, Italian American memory, family, migration, language, translation, and lyric form. Born in Sturno, Italy, he later made his literary life in the United States and became Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Rhode Island. His poetry collections include Cut Off the Ears of Winter and The Right Place to Jump. He has received recognition including the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, the Frank O’Hara Poetry Prize, and a National Endowment for the Arts translation fellowship.
Cut Off the Ears of Winter
The title Cut Off the Ears of Winter turns season into a body and gives violence an unexpectedly lyrical target. Winter can hear; the speaker can imagine severing its capacity to listen.
This surreal gesture creates a field where climate, body, pain, and desire meet. Covino’s poetry often gives emotional intensity a physical form, allowing abstract states to become visible through bodily image.
Italian American memory
Migration places family history across languages and geographies. Italy remains available through names, stories, food, speech, photographs, and remembered places while American life creates another cultural environment.
Covino’s poetry works inside this double location. Memory becomes transatlantic, carrying family intimacy and cultural inheritance through the changes produced by migration.
Language and family
Family language can preserve accents, idioms, untranslated words, and habits of speech that carry cultural history. A phrase may become emotionally charged because it belongs to a particular relative or domestic setting.
Poetry can keep such language active without forcing it into explanatory prose. Covino’s lyric work allows linguistic difference to remain part of the texture of memory.
Queer desire
Queer desire gives Covino’s poetry another field of inheritance and self-making. Intimacy is experienced through bodies and relationships while also encountering cultural expectations about masculinity, family, sexuality, and belonging.
Lyric form is especially suited to these tensions because it can hold tenderness, fear, humor, shame, and erotic intensity within a short space.
The Right Place to Jump
The Right Place to Jump makes decision spatial. A jump requires a point of departure, an imagined landing, bodily risk, and commitment once motion begins.
The title gives transition a physical metaphor. Desire, migration, artistic choice, and changes in identity can all be understood through moments when a person has to move before the outcome is fully known.
Body and risk
Covino’s poetry often lets the body carry emotional stakes. Touch, injury, sex, cold, movement, and vulnerability create a material vocabulary for states that might otherwise remain abstract.
This bodily emphasis gives risk immediacy. The poem asks what a person can endure, desire, remember, and transform through language.
Translation
Covino’s work as a translator extends his attention to language across cultural and historical boundaries. Translation requires close decisions about rhythm, idiom, syntax, tone, and the literary associations attached to particular words.
For a poet shaped by migration and multilingual memory, translation also carries personal resonance. Language becomes a route between cultural worlds as well as a literary craft.
Translation fellowship
A National Endowment for the Arts translation fellowship recognizes the sustained labor required to bring a literary work into English. Such projects demand research, revision, and repeated testing of how a sentence lives in the target language.
The work complements Covino’s own poetry because both practices depend on exact listening. A translated line and an original lyric line are shaped through attention to pace, sound, and pressure.
Barrow Street Press
Covino is a founding editor and trustee of Barrow Street Press, connecting his individual writing with the literary infrastructure that supports other poets. Editing requires attention to manuscripts, sequence, publication, and the development of a press’s aesthetic identity.
Small presses play a major role in contemporary poetry because they create durable books for work that may depend on formal or cultural specificity. Covino’s editorial labor becomes part of that larger ecosystem.
Teaching
At the University of Rhode Island, Covino’s teaching brings poetry, translation, and creative writing into a community of developing writers. Workshop and literary study require close articulation of formal choices.
Teaching also keeps a poet in continual conversation with new work and changing literary concerns, giving craft a social environment.
A transatlantic lyric
Covino’s writing gains coherence from the meeting of migration, queer desire, family language, translation, and the body. Italy and the United States remain connected through memory, while intimate experience tests inherited ideas about identity and belonging.
His poems make these pressures vivid through physical image and lyric concentration. Across Cut Off the Ears of Winter, The Right Place to Jump, translation, editing, and teaching, language becomes a means of carrying desire and memory across distances that remain culturally and emotionally alive.
Readers can continue through the site’s contemporary poets collection for related writers and traditions.