Closed Season – Monika Herceg

Opis

Closed Season by Croatian poet Monika Herceg is an award-winning collection of poems that brings together physics, politics, memory, feminism, and lived experience. Its title comes from the Croatian word lovostaj, meaning “closed season”—a period during which hunting is prohibited and animals are temporarily free from the fear of being killed. Herceg transforms this deceptively simple idea into a powerful metaphor for a world in which women have rarely been granted the same freedom from danger.

The poems confront the realities of patriarchy, violence, war, exile, inequality, and social exclusion, asking how poetry can speak about experiences that have been repeated across generations and cultures. Rather than treating these subjects as distant political abstractions, Herceg approaches them through memory, the body, history, and the everyday consequences of systems built around power and control.

A defining characteristic of the collection is the poet’s unusual ability to connect scientific thought and political reality. As a physicist by profession, Herceg brings concepts and imagery from physics into poems that are deeply concerned with human relationships and social structures. Scientific language becomes a way of questioning certainty, examining forces that shape our lives, and searching for connections between the intimate and the universal.

The result is poetry that can be fiercely angry, but never emotionally empty. Herceg’s anger is directed at the structures and histories that normalize suffering, particularly the violence experienced by women and those pushed outside dominant systems. At the same time, the poems resist the idea that violence is the only possible inheritance. Beneath the rage runs a persistent desire for new stories, new forms of solidarity, and the possibility of hope.

The collection also carries the imprint of personal and collective history. Experiences of war, displacement, and violence become part of a broader reflection on memory: whose stories survive, whose suffering is remembered, and who is allowed to speak. Herceg’s poems challenge versions of history centered solely on winners, institutions, or official narratives, creating space for those whose voices have traditionally been overlooked.

Olga Tokarczuk, Nobel Prize–winning author, has described Herceg’s poetry as deeply connected to pain, memory, anger, and hope, emphasizing its concern with responsibility toward Europe, women, and people excluded by political and ideological systems. That breadth is characteristic of Closed Season: its poems move between the personal and the political, the historical and the contemporary, without losing their emotional intensity.

Herceg’s language is direct yet richly suggestive, creating images that remain memorable long after the individual poem has ended. Her poetry does not attempt to soften difficult subjects. Instead, it confronts them head-on and asks what can still be rebuilt after violence, what responsibility looks like in the present, and whether language itself can become a place of resistance.

Monika Herceg is a Croatian poet, screenwriter, dramatist, editor, and activist. She is the author of three poetry collections, including Početne koordinate (Initial Coordinates), Lovostaj, and Vrijeme prije jezika (Time Before Language). She has received numerous national and international literary awards, including the European Poet of Freedom Award in 2024. A physicist by training, she grew up in the village of Pecki near Petrinja and lives and works in Zagreb.

For readers interested in contemporary poetry, feminist poetry, Croatian literature, political poetry, women’s writing, war and memory, and poetry that bridges science with the humanities, Closed Season offers a bold and emotionally charged collection about violence, responsibility, survival, and the search for a world beyond fear.