Dirty Words

Description

Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Native Australian Studies. "If language is a virus, DIRTY WORDS is an inoculation, the alphabet jabbed by a 'sing-chant-rage' that liberates the breath and restores the heart. Natalie Harkin joins the great chain of Indigenous Australian voices that rise and stir and sing, shaking their shackles to the earth like blood that blooms letters of power." Peter Minter"

Natalie Harkin is a Narungga writer from South Australia. Her PhD focussed an archival-poetic response to her family's Aboriginal records, informed by blood memory and haunting. She is a member of the First Nations Australia Writers Network, and was recently invited to conduct a poetics master class at the Ottawa International Writers Festival. She is part of the Unbound collective with her colleagues at Yunggorendi, Flinders University, a group of Aboriginal women academics, experimental writers and artists creatively interrogating South Australia's archives and colonial history. Her words have been exhibited in text- object-video projections, wallpapering, paste-ups, words on glass and linen, and with other related objects including a basket woven from her nanna and great-grandmother's letters found in the State Aboriginal archives. DIRTY WORDS (Cordite Books, 2015) is her first poetry collection.