LOCAL LITERATURE
“Floodchaser” is a debut poetry collection that weaves together personal narrative, myth and place, shaped in part by the author’s time in San Marcos while attending Texas State University during the COVID-19 pandemic. The collection by Aaron Tyler Hand is available for pre-order from Catamaran Literary Reader ahead of its April 3 release.
The piece follows two intertwined narratives. One centers on a fictional character who leaves home, which is drawn from Hand’s own experience moving from Missouri to Oregon and then Texas, and must face the cost of absence, missed relationships and distance in general. The other narrative reimagines the story of Noah, digging deeper into what that experience must have been like.
“I was always told growing up Noah grabbed two of every animal, and he lived on the ark for 40 days and 40 nights and then got off,” Hand said. “But I never thought deeper into what that meant — the isolation of being on a boat, the fact that they weren’t on the boat for 40 days, they were on the boat for over a year, and what that would mean for people being isolated with this responsibility of keeping animals alive, and how much time that is to reflect on everyone that was lost. They’re the only people that lived.”
San Marcos was a muse for the book, particularly the San Marcos cemetery, where Hand spent a lot of time reading and writing.
“There’s two poems set in that cemetery, a very beautiful place that led to a lot of the poems in this book,” Hand said. “There’s a peacock that wanders around, so I would hear the peacock squawking. And there’s tons of deer walking around. … Nature was just really cathartic for me.”
For a collection written in San Marcos, it is no surprise that water serves as a unifying motif across the collection, appearing in forms ranging from floods to rivers and erosion.
“Water could be more than a flood,” Hand said. “We see it pop up in the poems as a canal that me and friends jumped into, or it comes up as something that washes away part of a tombstone where you can’t read the whole thing.”
Another theme running through the book is a nod to Hand’s home as he weaved in Ozark folklore.
“As someone who grew up in Missouri, I was trying to regain that connection to a place that I feel like I’m no longer a part of,” he said.
That early sense of channeling emotions through poetry traces back to his beginnings as a writer when Hand published a “gushy” poem about how he was grateful to be adopted by his mother in a school publication in first grade. He said he backed away from the practice for years, until he got back into poetry through lyric writing in high school when he joined a metal band. Once he started taking creative writing classes in college, his passion was reignited.
Hand has had several poems published in various literary journals, but “Floodchaser” is his first full collection.
Purchase “Floodchaser” at catamaranliteraryreader. squarespace. com/books/floodchaser.
