Pretenders

by Kate Potts

ISBN: 9781780377308

Published: 2025-05-20

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.