''Archival-Poetics'' is a book of poetry by the Australian poet and

Narungga The Narungga people, also spelt Narangga, are a group of Aboriginal Australians whose traditional lands are located throughout Yorke Peninsula, South Australia. Their traditional language, one of the Yura-Thura grouping, is Narungga. Countr ...

woman Natalie Harkin. It was first published in 2019 by Vagabond Press. It won the

Kate Challis RAKA Award The Kate Challis RAKA Award is an arts award worth , awarded annually by the University of Melbourne in Victoria, Australia to Indigenous Australian creative artists. It is awarded in a five-year cycle, each year in a different area of the arts: c ...

in 2020.

About the work

''Archival-Poetics'' is inspired by letters written by Harkin's grandmother and other family members. The letters were kept in the South Australia's Aboriginal Records archive. The poetry collection consists of three chapbooks in a slipcase, where each chapbook's cover shows an image from a performance by Harkin titled ''Archive-Fever-Paradox''. The book is "a collage of archival extracts together with the writer's poetry, artwork, weaving and installation photo-stills", a form of docu-poetry. Rather than a family memoir, ''Archival-Poetics'' "re-enacts the experience of confronting the record, with its heart-stopping shocks of finding her loved ones negated".

Reception

The book won the

in 2020. It received positive reviews in several literary journals.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Archival-Poetics Australian poetry Narungga Indigenous Australian literature 2019 poetry books Australian poetry books Australian Aboriginal art Australian Aboriginal culture