Unsafe

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 *
McCarthy Woolf’s taut new book reflects both the semblance of wholeness and the opacities of erasure . . . A playfully sparse and hypnotic collection -- Oluwaseun Olayiwola * Guardian *
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 -- Nikolai Duffy * Tablet *
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
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 *
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 -- Sairah Ahsan * Ink, Sweat and Tears *
[A] Sharp . . . ruptured epic . . . Unsafe refuses neat classification: part lyric essay, part long poem . . . part gathering of fragments * Mslexia *
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 *
A moving, critical and highly intuitive epic weaving together poetry, documentary and lyric essay * Poetry Society *