When the Wind Has Teeth (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781972806142)

In this striking debut collection, Espann James traces the path of a storm through the landscape of memory, family, and selfhood. Structured in four movements - Gale, Squall, Derecho, Calm - these poems move from the first unsettling gusts of change through sustained reckoning and into stillness.

Espann writes from the intersection of Black American experience, queer identity, and Southern place. His poems inhabit the house on Atkinson Street and the red clay of Carolina soil. They hold a grandmother's hands, a chipped mug, the double-knotted shoelaces of a childhood learning to speak itself into being. They confront, too, the violence that shares colors with celebration - police lights and parade confetti both burning red and blue.

Espann's range moves from three-line lyrics to poems that unfold across pages, and the form always follows the pressure of the material. He writes toward difficulty without flinching and without spectacle. These are poems about inheritance you did not choose, about what a body carries after the weather has passed through it, and about the strange work of standing up again in air that has changed.