Other Possible Lives - Poems by Chrissy Kolaya

Publication Date: October 2019
Paperback, 80 pages
ISBN: 978-1-937968-56-4

Available from Small Press Distribution

At one point in Chrissy Kolaya’s new poetry collection she recounts a Korean student struggling to recall the English word “nightgown” and instead saying “dream dresses.” How perfect a description for these poems, for in reading them we do slip into dream dresses, garments that let us try on Other Possible Lives, like the couple in the opening cycle “House Sitters” who imagine the life they might have lived in a wealthy client’s home, “a dream life, borrowed.” Not that the lives imagined here are necessarily dreamy, and a great many of these poems deal with the difficulties of relationships, the recognition that “Sometimes the folks who aren’t speaking / are the ones who know each other best,” or the realization at the end of an evening that “tonight / you are not a lot to live on.” There is also a sparseness to the imagery at times, appropriate for a poet of the upper prairie, and Minnesota winters make more than one appearance, underscoring the emotional chill. (Now that Kolaya has moved to Florida, it will be interesting to see how a warmer climate infuses her poetry!)

“Always, I am afraid // of missing something better,” says the speaker in one poem, and this is the crux of the collection. We are still haunted by Frost’s two roads diverging, the binary of one choice precluding another, and Kolaya’s statement of this theme comes in the final lines of the closing poem, “The Right Track,” when the speaker, following the end of another relationship laments, It was about to happen. // Everything / was about to happen. We are always just on the verge, and we create worlds through the choices we make – but in poetry, at least, we have the chance to see where the other road might have taken us.

Praise for Chrissy Kolaya and Other Possible Lives

Grappling with the consequences of real and imagined choices, Chrissy Kolaya’s Other Possible Lives gives us a world of shifting landscapes, of missing girls and temporary homes. With devastating detail, the poems trace the tumultuous geographies of everyday life and love in flux. These poems offer up glimpses of alternate endings, of the freezing and thawing of love, leaving us to wander a world full of possibilities, where “everything was about to happen.”

—Vandana Khanna, author of The Goddess Monologues, Afternoon Masala, & Train to Agra

What would you see if you could remove the fourth wall of every house, every apartment, every building on the block and peer in unseen at the tangle of crisscrossing human relationships as they unfold or unravel or disintegrate over time? What if you could do the same thing with your own life, and apprehend the what ifs and might’ve beens, the various lives that you could’ve lead—and still might—instead? In Chrissy Kolaya’s psychologically sparkling and suspenseful Other Possible Lives, the reality of the situation is never like TV, it’s unpredictable, unproduced and wooly/nuanced—full of bliss, infidelity, faux pas, complication. These often painterly (and very contemporary, American) poems present us with the recognizable uncertainty of (the) character inside all of us. Here, the domestic and the social, the public and the private, splinter into each other, to present a dynamic vision of marriage, family, and ordinary life—teetering like a sound on the edge of breakup, not quite distorted and not quite clean, but one we can see (and certainly feel) when we look.”

—Matt Hart, author of Everything Breaking/For Good & The Obliterations

In Chrissy Kolaya’s Other Possible Lives, people constellate, disperse, come back together again, the space between them charged and dreamlike. All the possible lives and all possible endings shapeshift on the page, and what binds both these lives and this book is a tenderness almost too true to bear. This is gorgeous and glowing work.

—Kerri Webster, author of The Trailhead, Grand & Arsenal, & We Do Not Eat Our Hearts Alone

Chrissy Kolaya is a poet and fiction writer, and in addition to her Broadstone Books titles she is the author of the novel Charmed Particles.

Her work has been included in the anthologies New Sudden Fiction (Norton), Fiction on a Stick (Milkweed Editions), and Stone, River, Sky: An Anthology of Georgia Poems, as well as in a number of literary journals.

As one of the co-founders of the Prairie Gate Literary Festival, she
worked to develop the literary arts community in rural western Minnesota. She has received a Norman Mailer Writers Colony summer scholarship, an Anderson Center for Interdisciplinary Studies fellowship, a Loft Mentor Series Award in Poetry, and grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Lake Region Arts Council, and the University of Minnesota. She teaches creative writing at the University of Central Florida. You can learn more about her work at www.chrissykolaya.com.