Closed Season

In Croatian, lovostaj means “closed season”—a time when hunting is prohibited. Animals that are hunted by humans are allowed to relax during this time of year, not having to live in fear of being shot. The poems gathered in this award-winning collection by Monika Herceg fuse physics with politics to create righteously angry and alarmingly memorable poems that explore new ways to express the horrors women the world over have been, and are continually, forced to deal with in a painfully patriarchal world. “Monika Herceg`s poetry is like a wound through which the world shines—painful, true, saturated with memory and anger, but also with hope for new stories. Her poems, arising from the experience of war, exile, and violence, transcend the boundaries of time and geography to stand up for those who never had a voice. This is poetry that is not afraid to speak of responsibility—for Europe, for women, for those excluded by systems and ideologies. Herceg writes about a history that no longer belongs to the victors, and about beauty that cannot fit into the confines we previously knew.”—Olga Tokarczuk, Nobel laureate Monika Herceg, a Croatian poet, screenwriter, dramatist, editor, and activist, is the author of three poetry books: Početne koordinate (Initial Coordinates, 2018), Lovostaj (2019), and Vrijeme prije jezika (2020). She has received many prestigious national and international awards, including the European Poet of Freedom Award 2024. A physicist by profession, she spent her childhood in the village of Pecki near Petrinja. A mother of two, she lives and works in Zagreb. Marina Veverec is a student of literary translation at the University of Zadar, Croatia. Her English-language translations have appeared in Denver Quarterly, Exchanges, Harvard Review, and Words Without Borders. She also translated Initial Coordinates, Monika Herceg’s first book of poetry to appear in English.