Initial Coordinates

In Monika Herceg’s Initial Coordinates, a deeply uncanny family history unfolds through four sections: “snake deaths (origin),” “bird deaths (escape),” “cat deaths (exile),” and “rabbit deaths (return).” Free of punctuation and capitalization, Herceg’s compact poems mix old wives’ tales with personal lore, reanimating these stories while pulling the speaker into “a journey to the family tree.” In “ouroboros,” the speaker recalls planting “stories in the hawthorn shrubs / so the offspring could find their way back.”

In Herceg’s telling, there is no neat border to be drawn between humans, animals, and nature. The poem “fruit” likens a pregnant woman to a blossoming “young cherry tree,” whose “fruit had tiny eyes for good luck / and hair full of oak / half-doe half-sister.” And in “inheritable diseases” we encounter “a half-doe half-grandma” who “would plant in us the seeds of autumn / that would overgrow us like weeds.” 

Marina Veverec’s translation from the Croatian does an excellent job of capturing Herceg’s folkloristic fantasies, and I was especially struck by the poems’ depiction of (re)generation, transformation, and the spells that organize village life, as when, in “amnesia,”

plums inhale the flavors of the sun
then the pomace brings to boil
the core of the summer heat

In “thunder god” the speaker recalls their “grandmother’s mother” speaking of her “six sons and one daughter / sprouting up like mushrooms,” and in the poem “gatherers” we witness how

in the early summer children sprout in the vineyards
fatherless
like mushrooms after the rains

Initial Coordinates tirelessly weaves these reversals of birth and death until their distinction dissolves, and in the poem “bird deaths,” we observe how “winter corrodes the sparrows’ most insistent / inner waymarks / so they plummet through the sky like / kamikaze” until, “with the first southern wind / sunspots in them come alive / taking them back to / initial coordinates.”