On Your Finger Comet Orbits Break

Reading & Talk: Monika Herceg | Maša Seničić
Tuesday, 18 February 2025, 7.30 pm, Haus für Poesie

‘small-scale and equipped only with the bare essentials / i emerge like a stopover in the cyclical / migrations of average citizens’, begins Maša Seničić’s (born in 1990 in Serbia) second volume of poetry Povremena poput vikend-naselja (2019), published in German translation by Mascha Dabić under the title zeitweilig wie wochenendsiedlungen (Drava Verlag/ Treći Trg 2023). In three chapters, the poems create a ‘choreography of respite’ in which practised patterns of action and the principles of a society neglected due to affluence are compared with ‘inner landscapes’.

Monika Herceg’s (born in 1990 in Croatia) second volume of poetry, Lovostaj (Kontrast 2019), was published in 2023 in the German translation by Ivana Pajić under the title Jagdverbot (eta Verlag/Kontrast). The volume begins with a ‘Prologue for Gynophobes’ and creates a poetically dense chronology of oppression and emancipation based on Eve, the first woman who contradicted God. With poems dedicated to women such as Lise Meitner and Ada Lovelace, Monika Herceg writes a committed new mythology of female strength: ‘You are a self-confident poet / on your finger comet orbits break’.