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or contact Mario at mmpetrucci@hotmail.com
“For the good watchmaker, even failure can be useful in understanding the mechanism.” Letter 5.
Written in the lead-up to a particularly turbulent moment in Ukraine’s recent history, Petrucci’s micro-essays strike with the combined force of reportage, philosophy and parable. Both profound and witty, these ‘letters’ shun the churn of the news cycle in favour of the human cycle, offering keen diagnosis of our habits and blind spots, our lapses of imagination and attention, the perils of global modernity.
Illumination and metaphysics come disguised as journalism, the compressed form ideal for those averse to lengthy treatises. Each paragraph-sized detonation shatters contemporary illusions, razing what numbs, distracts or quietly warps us, clearing space for a 1000-word miniature masterpiece of existential clarity. Here, our deepest questions meet the conviction that insight and vigilance remain revolutionary. Challenging the core values we live by, ‘Letters to Ukraine’ delivers a masterclass in disciplined thought, 200 words at a time.
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When award-winning poet, broadcaster and ecologist Mario Petrucci was commissioned by the Kyiv publication The Day Digest to compose a monthly column for English speakers living in Ukraine, he resisted the urge to create a series of merely topical pieces reflecting conventional news items or any other of journalism’s simple duties and pleasures. Instead, he chose to honour and address the timeless spirit of his readers via a minimalist form consisting of (with one exception) just over 200 words, always initiated by a query possessing a more universal or unexpected, occasionally offbeat, trajectory.Petrucci’s mostly monthly column ran from February 2011 to September 2013, posing transcultural questions translucent with the glow of intrigue: “How best to measure human progress?”, “Who are the Invisibles?”, “Why are we obsessed with lead singers?” These remarkable ‘Micro-Essays’ have a hard-won clarity about them, grappling variously with love, life, art, popular culture, politics, metaphysics, Apocalypse, modernity/technology, ecology, Chornobyl, spirituality, and even a futuristic parallel universe (or is it our own?) in which the Mona Lisa is all but atomised, commercially, to raise capital. Christmas 2011’s ‘special edition’ wryly posed that ancient chestnut: “Who am I? Why am I here?” Petrucci conjured a miniature masterpiece in reply: a world of impassioned cogency in the almightily pithy span of a mere 1000 words.
The author reproduces, here, all 30 ‘letters’ exactly as he originally penned them. In a bid to preserve every nuance of their authentic moment, there is no retrospective attempt to check, qualify or perfect their content. And yet, somehow, they also carry a strangely moving, tangential resonance within the harrowing contexts of historical, as well as current, conflict in Ukraine. All in all, this unique project reinvents the essay so as to spur us into inhabiting our better selves intellectually, politically, morally. Against all the contemporary odds, Letters to Ukraine delivers an essential reboot to consciousness.
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“xxx and anarchic”Ves Gothy, Professor
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“xxxxxxxxxx.” Exxx 182 (June 202y; Pxxxx McXxxxx).