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A01=Karen McCarthy Woolf
an aviary of small birds
Author_Karen McCarthy Woolf
bittersweet
black british poets
british american colonialism
Category=DC
Category=DCC
Category=DCF
Category=WN
class division
contemporary poems
documentary poetry
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_new_release
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_poetry
gentrification
Jamaica
kin
poetry bombing
police brutality
postcolonial writing
seasonal disturbances
text and image
UK colonial past
william blake

Product details

  • ISBN 9781526666994
  • Weight: 141g
  • Dimensions: 126 x 196mm
  • Publication Date: 12 Feb 2026
  • Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
  • Publication City/Country: GB
  • Product Form: Paperback
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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

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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.
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'One of the most intellectually daring writers of our generation' MONA ARSHI
'McCarthy Woolf possesses a rare, uncanny power' KIT FAN

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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