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Unsafe

By: Karen McCarthy Woolf
Narrated by: Karen McCarthy Woolf
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About this listen

Bloomsbury presents Unsafe, written and read by Karen McCarthy Woolf,

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

©2026 Karen McCarthy Woolf (P)2026 Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Environment Nature & Ecology Outdoors & Nature Poetry Science Themes & Styles World Literature

Critic Reviews

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)
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