Overview

POETRY BOOK SOCIETY CHOICE The third collection from T. S. Eliot Prize-shortlisted poet, essayist and editor Karen McCarthy Woolf 'A work of intense epiphany' ROGER ROBINSON 'Unsafe will stay with me forever' SAFIA ELHILLO 'As urgent as it is meditative and thought provoking' PRETI TANEJA ____________________________________________________ A disenchanted walk through the afterlives of colonialism across London and LA, Unsafe illuminates the effects of capitalism on those who live at its sharp end. Situated in the midst of a reckoning with a politics of enclosure, Unsafe is an immersive meditation on place, the body, nature and the self. Whether it’s via tattoos, trees or the totemic quality of cats, McCarthy Woolf pulls us into the processes of gentrification and class division with an immediacy that makes them impossible to ignore. A moving, critical and highly intuitive epic weaving together poetry, documentary and lyric essay, Unsafe is an interrogation of what it means to be a citizen and testimony to the remaining spaces we can call free. ____________________________________________________ 'One of the most intellectually daring writers of our generation' MONA ARSHI 'McCarthy Woolf possesses a rare, uncanny power' KIT FAN

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9781526666994

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Reviews

In Karen McCarthy Woolf’s Unsafe, nature poetry is brought firmly into the 21st century – less kicking and screaming than hissing and clawing, like the feral cats that stalk the grubby backstreets of this brave and unsettling long poem. Nature poets sometimes have a tendency to depict place as if viewed through rose-tinted spectacles, but McCarthy Woolf’s gaze is fearless. She focuses on forgotten damp corners to expose a gritty, glaring truth -- Jade Cuttle * OBSERVER * Unsafe is a work of intense epiphany. McCarthy Woolf deploys a tactical use of space to express a complex twenty-first-century politics of place. As poetry it helps us process and cope with the pressures of the modern world. A revelation -- ROGER ROBINSON, T. S. Eliot Prize-winning author of A Portable Paradise In Unsafe, McCarthy Woolf deploys the white of the page as a weapon: a perpetual, visual reminder of pervasive suffocation. This collection is a work of textual performance, the tangible evidence of one voice's attempt to find spaces for itself – spaces in which to think about black and brown experiences – amidst loud, wordless whiteness. A catalogue of limits – both material and linguistic – and an analysis of those limits, Unsafe blends form to poke and press at the fences and ceilings that delineate empire -- SUSANNAH DICKEY, PEN Heaney Prize-winning author of ISDAL Epic and complicated and fiercely intelligent. Karen McCarthy Woolf’s Unsafe will stay with me forever -- SAFIA ELHILLO, author of Girls That Never Die As urgent as it is meditative and thought provoking; Unsafe delights in its breathtaking use of language and form, it devastates in its clarity of vision -- PRETI TANEJA, author of We That Are Young Suspenseful, inventive and empathetic – a brooding performance of surveilled, stolen, risky and reclaimed space where reading becomes an act of witness, companionship and defiance -- ELIZABETH-JANE BURNETT, author of The Grassling McCarthy Woolf's tuning fork always rings true -- Kate Kellaway * Guardian * One of the most intellectually daring writers of our generation -- MONA ARSHI, author of Somebody Loves You McCarthy Woolf possesses a rare, uncanny power -- KIT FAN, author of The Ink Cloud Reader

PRAISE FOR KAREN McCARTHY WOOLF: ‘Stunning, sophisticated, subtle ... wryly humorous and nuanced’ * BBC Arts *

As urgent as it is meditative and thought provoking; Unsafe delights in its breathtaking use of language and form, it devastates in its clarity of vision -- PRETI TANEJA, author of We That Are Young Suspenseful, inventive and empathetic – a brooding performance of surveilled, stolen, risky and reclaimed space where reading becomes an act of witness, companionship and defiance -- ELIZABETH-JANE BURNETT, author of The Grassling McCarthy Woolf's tuning fork always rings true -- Kate Kellaway * Guardian * One of the most intellectually daring writers of our generation -- MONA ARSHI, author of Somebody Loves You McCarthy Woolf possesses a rare, uncanny power -- KIT FAN, author of The Ink Cloud Reader

Author Information

Born in London to English and Jamaican parents, Karen McCarthy Woolf FRSL is a poet, editor, essayist and librettist. Her novel in verse, Top Doll, was a Guardian Book of the Year and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. As a postdoctoral Fulbright Scholar at UCLA she was the inaugural poet in residence at the Promise Institute for Human Rights. In 2025, she won a Society of Authors Cholmondeley Award and the Jerwood Prize for Poetry (England).

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