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

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