Monika Herceg / Courtesy moherceg.wordpress.com

In her stunning collection Closed Season, translated by Marina Veverec (Sandford Passage, 2025), poet, playwright, essayist, feminist, activist, and editor Monika Herceg delivers a poetic, antipatriarchal tour de force. Combining religious allusions with mythological ones, Herceg’s poems scour and analyze history’s—and gynophobia’s—annals. She dissects childbirth, body dysmorphia, motherhood, daughterhood, female oppression, and violence. Herceg, nonetheless, uses intimately personal language to create an eye-opening universal female experience.

“Body” is a violence-ridden poem in which the speaker boldly announces “I gave birth to a son and dreaded his nature.” The poem becomes a proclamation against traditional, prescribed masculine behaviors—specifically the glorification of and involvement in violence. “My son will never set a cat on fire,” the speaker declares. The speaker depicts the cat as female, deformed by radiation, and subjected to violence by “the neighborhood boys” who “will light cat tails like / firecrackers.” Jarringly, the cat’s experiences parallel what the speaker foresees for the neighborhood women: “all the neighborhood women will burn like the cats.” The poem’s last eight lines are incantatory, mysterious, even folkloric:

I don’t understand why you get so distrustful
You know I bore a us a son tough enough
to turn into a girl
when you’re not looking 

She must have grown up that day
the puss put on the boots,
took away the clarity of her sex
Nothing could be done.

The speaker’s second-person point-of-view usage is direct and jarring, even accusatory. The final stanza’s observance of the unidentifiable “She”—which can be interpreted as the cat or the son— reinforces the mysterious tone. The ending’s power lies in the ambiguity, the sudden yet blurry shapeshifting, and the blunt acceptance and recognition in the statement “Nothing could be done.”

“A Women’s Shelter” is another of the collection’s formidable poems. The pronoun “We” appears as the poem’s first word, and its placement creates a sense of unification and establishes a declarative tone. Again, nature—specifically animals and the violence they endure at the hands of humans—serves as a parallel to females and the violence they encounter from men. The speaker describes the collective as “the deaf and underfed does” with their “fawns / gnawing at our feeble breasts.” Images associated with hunting and trapping—such as steel snares in which the does stand “with one foot”—portray the violence. The does stand, waiting “for someone to tell us all about / what it’s like to have // a safe night.” A perception of forced powerlessness develops, and it is as inescapable as the snare holding the doe’s foot fast.

Nature—specifically animals and the violence they endure at the hands of humans—serves as a parallel to females and the violence they encounter from men.

“Mary’s Monologue to the Poet over an Earthly Coffee” is a poem truly encapsulating Herceg’s talent for fusing the historical and the religious with contemporary female issues. In lines like “Behind you women gather to decipher the traces in your / coffee,” the old world fuses with the new. Other lines, such as “will you blossom or burn out” pose a question faced by contemporary women as they navigate workplaces, motherhood, marriages, and relationships in societies still rooted in patriarchal values. Mary—the poem’s speaker—admits, “I was made up / for no one to ever consider my feelings / in the name of a higher purpose.” The poem waxes boldly and beautifully sacrilegious: “for no one ever to ask whether immaculate conception / is a form of rape.” Mary acknowledges her powerlessness despite her prestige, and she offers her audience some keen advice about how to reclaim their power: “And if you ever find yourself on the brink of such an abyss / demand a divorce / and full custody.” 

The poems of Closed Season dare to convey the experiences of the voiceless and the powerless.

Closed Season is a feminist manifesto in its own worthy right. Its poems dare to convey the experiences of the voiceless and the powerless. These verses demand accountability from the oppressors and responsibility for women and all those who are marginalized by society’s systems. These poems are fierce, angry, and memorable—and this translation brings one of Croatia’s leading poetic voices to English-speaking audiences everywhere. 

Southern New Hampshire University