Overview
In Pretenders, her third book of poetry, Kate Potts asks: what is it like, as a daily, lived experience, to feel like a fraud or a fake? And what can 'the imposter phenomenon' a sense that our true abilities and achievements, and other core aspects of our identities, are unreal, undeserved or mistakenly bestowed tell us about who we are and how we relate to one another? Through lively and vivid poetic monologues drawn from original interview material, and through original poetry, Pretenders begins to consider individual feelings and experiences of fraudulence, pretence and persona in a wider social and historical context. The varied, hesitant, questing voices build to create a bold and innovative chorus. Pretenders shines a light on our value systems and hierarchies, unsettling notions of 'realness', self-assurance, and the self.
Full Product Details
Author: Kate Potts
Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Imprint: Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Edition: Paperback original
Dimensions:
Width: 13.80cm
, Height: 1.10cm
, Length: 21.60cm
ISBN: 9781780377308
ISBN 10: 1780377304
Pages: 128
Publication Date: 27 March 2025
Audience:
General/trade
,
General
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: In Print
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Reviews
These are poems of a marvellously observed, bodily interiority which engage with our animal selves, at a loss in the concrete warrens of our cities, as they starve or gorge, roam or home. The resulting book is deeply personal, compelling, occasionally hilarious and frequently unsettling as the 'strange fish' of our thoughts emerge from their 'iron guardedness' and hitch themselves to the amazing railings of these poems. And the radio poem The Blown Definitions is a wonder, a whole island mythos to itself. Kate Potts is one of the foremost writers of our generation. Buy this monstrously brilliant book. -- Fiona Benson * on Feral * Excitement is one thing that is definitely not missing from Kate Potts’s Feral. The language here dazzles, astonishes; the poems are alive. I would say that the poet is incapable of writing a predictable sentence, but it feels more true to say that she is incapable of writing a predictable word...To read Feral for a while is to find it bamboozling and beautiful, to want to read it for longer. Once that’s done, the only response is to consider it a masterpiece, and to feel that everyone who cares about language should read it. -- Jonathan Edwards * Poetry Wales * Feral is a storehouse of manifold enchantments: a book in which lore and personal iconography are melded to startling effect. The technical assurance displayed here alongside a strong beating heart make for a sonically and emotionally rich reading, and re-reading, experience. This collection is 'a feat of balance', as the poem 'Iron Horse' has it, where each component gives shape and function to the elegant motion of the whole. -- Kayo Chingonyi It has taken Potts seven years to write this follow-up to her debut Pure Hustle. It’s been worth the wait. Feral is musical, joyously weird and filled with moments of pure pleasure. -- Tristram Fane Saunders * The Telegraph (Poetry Book of the Month) *
Where did that voice come from, asks one of the voices here, that was telling me I wasn’t doing anything right? This is one of the serious questions Pretenders investigates, together with the ways in which our sense of self is pressure-formed by the roles we perform and are expected to perform. The voices worry about neediness (like you, like me), but their project is thoroughly generous: here are individuals feeling along the paradoxes of pretence and the precarities of selfhood for our collective benefit. Their disclosures, and the author’s own, rhyme with Potts’ (characteristically sharp-eyed) excursions into historical imposture; the result is a hall of mirrors in which readers may see themselves and others reflected a bit more clearly, a bit more kindly. If you’ve ever had the feeling that you’re not good enough, you should read this book. If you’ve never had that feeling, then you must read this book. -- Abigail Parry With the intimate air of a secret vouchsafed, Pretenders is an immersive, compelling, original work of documentary poetics. Potts takes on the role of poet as filmmaker, cutting between voices: we feel her guiding presence behind each frame, and her skill. Across the collection’s trans-membered testimonies, lyric tension creeps back in via the poems’ consummate rendering of hesitation, emotion, and silence on the page. As a study of imposter feelings, Pretenders is revelatory: humane in its ability to hold and make space for vulnerability, and alert to the socio-political dynamics that underpin the impulse to self-doubt. Whatever mode she’s working in, Potts is an essential poet. -- Sarah Howe These are poems of a marvellously observed, bodily interiority which engage with our animal selves, at a loss in the concrete warrens of our cities, as they starve or gorge, roam or home. The resulting book is deeply personal, compelling, occasionally hilarious and frequently unsettling as the 'strange fish' of our thoughts emerge from their 'iron guardedness' and hitch themselves to the amazing railings of these poems. And the radio poem The Blown Definitions is a wonder, a whole island mythos to itself. Kate Potts is one of the foremost writers of our generation. Buy this monstrously brilliant book. -- Fiona Benson * on Feral * Excitement is one thing that is definitely not missing from Kate Potts’s Feral. The language here dazzles, astonishes; the poems are alive. I would say that the poet is incapable of writing a predictable sentence, but it feels more true to say that she is incapable of writing a predictable word...To read Feral for a while is to find it bamboozling and beautiful, to want to read it for longer. Once that’s done, the only response is to consider it a masterpiece, and to feel that everyone who cares about language should read it. -- Jonathan Edwards * Poetry Wales * Feral is a storehouse of manifold enchantments: a book in which lore and personal iconography are melded to startling effect. The technical assurance displayed here alongside a strong beating heart make for a sonically and emotionally rich reading, and re-reading, experience. This collection is 'a feat of balance', as the poem 'Iron Horse' has it, where each component gives shape and function to the elegant motion of the whole. -- Kayo Chingonyi It has taken Potts seven years to write this follow-up to her debut Pure Hustle. It’s been worth the wait. Feral is musical, joyously weird and filled with moments of pure pleasure. -- Tristram Fane Saunders * The Telegraph (Poetry Book of the Month) *
Author Information
Kate Potts is a poet, academic and editor. She is a visiting lecturer at Middlesex University, and a tutor at The Poetry School. She completed a practice-based PhD on the poetic radio play in 2017. Her pamphlet Whichever Music (tall-lighthouse) was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice in 2008 and was shortlisted for a Michael Marks Award. Her first full-length collection, Pure Hustle, was published by Bloodaxe in 2011. Her second collection, Feral (Bloodaxe Books, 2018), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her third, Pretenders, is published by Bloodaxe in 2025. Kate is co-director of Somewhere in Particular, a site-specific poetry organisation which aims to connect poetry performance to specific places and communities and to reach beyond conventional audiences. She lives in Stroud, Gloucestershire.
