***Pre-Order*** The books will be shipped April 3, 2026.

The poetry collection Floodchaser by Aaron Tyler Hand from Portland Oregon was the winner of the 2025 Catamaran Poetry Prize for West Coast Poets. The book was selected by the judge, poet Mary Szybist, from many manuscripts submitted from poets living in California, Oregon , Washington, Alaska, and Hawaii.

Floodchaser  reinhabits Noah’s biblical story with surprising urgency and power. It makes mythical and familial inheritances feel palpable but not unbreakable. Wonderfully restless in its formal inventiveness, it breaks and remakes patterns, letting them swirl into rhythms that are unpredictably alive. This is a book about blistering grief and bewilderment, but it is also about resurrection, the kind that is possible once we face the ways in which the “Past and Present [hold] hands around each other’s throat.” Aaron Tyler Hand’s lyrics are emotionally bracing, deeply engaged with the possibilities and reach of the human voice. —Mary Szybist

Aaron Tyler Hand’s Floodchaser is saturated with myth, wonder, familial reckoning, grief, possibility, and a kind of filth that will cleanse you. This is a swelling lyric, with images swirling in their magnified light: “Like a halo, the bug zapper illuminated the back porch” and “each one with a hand to their forehead / as if blocking the sun, as if onion-eyed.” Floodchaser lingers in the layers of faith, selfhood, and relation as we brace for “the rot / that comes for everything.” Formally playful, each poem reorients us with unexpected strangeness. This is a world I loved dwelling in—where peacocks peck at graves and tenderness lies in green stars ever-glowing. —Jane Wong

The landscapes that Floodchaser’s up-to-the-minute speakers recount, with wariness and genuine affection, are often full of gaps, gushing water, lesions, and glittering detritus. Insisting on its current relevance, poet Aaron Tyler Hand reenvisions Noah’s fantastically crowded Ark as both a claustrophobic domestic ordeal and a funky laboratory for hard-earned intimacy and profound family truths—an interspecies voyage as rollicking and upending as a twenty-first-century reality show! Full of dynamic, edgy details and consistently bracing imagery, Floodchaser is a kaleidoscopic, deeply exhilarating debut. Read it!—Cyrus Cassells