FOMITE
The three sections of World Headquarters resonate with and reinforce the interconnectedness among the local and universal, the personal and political, the human and non-human worlds. Poems comprising Part II, ad-Dawha, were begun while Peter Fortunato lived in Doha, the capital of Qatar. During the rapid modernization of that desert emirate, Fortunato taught four years at the newly opened Weill Cornell Medicine. But where exactly is the world’s headquarters—these poems dance across the horizons of the mind, unlimited in its essence, particular in its myriad expressions.
About the Author:
Peter Fortunato has published several other poetry collections, the novel Carnevale (from Fomite Press) and a memoir, Desert Wind: My Life in Qatar. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where he was awarded the Randall Jarrell Fellowship, and from Cornell University a BA in English. Mr. Fortunato has taught writing and literature at Cornell and Ithaca College, as well as at Weill Cornell Medicine in Qatar. Among his honors are the Emily Dickinson Prize of the Poetry Society of America, a Pablo Neruda Prize from the Oklahoma Arts Council, and a Yeats Poetry Prize from the WB Yeats Society of NY. Peter Fortunato has been a student of Zen and Tibetan Buddhism for more than 50 years, as well as an artist and practitioner of complementary alternative medicine. He lives in Ithaca, New York.
