Bloomsbury Poetry, 2026, softcover, 144 pages, 12.6 x 19.6 cm
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.
