Archival-Poetics is inspired by letters written by Harkin's grandmother and other family members. The letters were kept in the South Australia 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,[1] a reference to Jacques Derrida's book Archive Fever. 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.[2]
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".[1]
