Pretenders

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.

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.