Pretenders

Reviews / Votes

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) *