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Unsafe
- Author
- Karen McCarthy Woolf
- Narrator
- Karen McCarthy Woolf
- Publisher
- Bloomsbury Publishing
- Publish Date
- 12 February 2026
- Run Time
- 36 minutes
- Format
- Audiobook
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What to expect
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
Critics Review
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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
OBSERVER
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McCarthy Woolf’s taut new book reflects both the semblance of wholeness and the opacities of erasure . . . A playfully sparse and hypnotic collection
Guardian
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A kaleidoscopic, formally restless collection that casts an uncompromising gaze on social, economic and racial inequalities and the way they become reinforced through a series of enclosures . . . A book that limns with indignation
Tablet
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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
See more reviews See fewer reviews
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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
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Epic and complicated and fiercely intelligent. Karen McCarthy Woolf’s Unsafe will stay with me forever
SAFIA ELHILLO, author of Girls That Never Die
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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
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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
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McCarthy Woolf's tuning fork always rings true
Guardian
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One of the most intellectually daring writers of our generation
MONA ARSHI, author of Somebody Loves You
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McCarthy Woolf possesses a rare, uncanny power
KIT FAN, author of The Ink Cloud Reader
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A moving, critical and fiercely intelligent epic weaving together poetry, documentary and images, Unsafe is a testimony to the remaining spaces we can call free, an interrogation of what it means to be a citizen
Poetry Book Society, Book of the Week
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Thoughtfully presented . . . Philosophically dense . . . McCarthy Woolf pays attention to the landscape, making it unfamiliar and newly beautiful, documenting how it is navigated in our moment of contemporary crisis
Ink, Sweat and Tears
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[A] Sharp . . . ruptured epic . . . Unsafe refuses neat classification: part lyric essay, part long poem . . . part gathering of fragments
Mslexia
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The scope is epic, and the long-poem format (ranging over 130 pages) makes it a kind of modern-day hybrid between T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’-style collage with the incantatory tone of Walt Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself’
The Alchemy Spoon
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A moving, critical and highly intuitive epic weaving together poetry, documentary and lyric essay
Poetry Society
User Reviews
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Details
- Author
- Karen McCarthy Woolf
- Narrator
- Karen McCarthy Woolf
- Duration
- 36 minutes
- Release Date
- 12 February 2026
- ISBN
- 9781526667021
- Format
- Audiobook
- Publisher
- Bloomsbury Publishing
- Genre
- Poetry / Poems, Nature and the natural world: general interest, Poetry / poems by individual poets, Modern and contemporary poetry / poems
Synopsis
Bloomsbury presents Unsafe, written and read by Karen McCarthy Woolf,POETRY BOOK SOCIETY CHOICEThe 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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