When the Wind has Teeth

Advance Reader Copy

Genres

Family, African American, LGBT, Debut, and Poems

Trigger Warnings

Death, Rape, Sex, Abuse, Violence, and Suicide

Type of Ending

Series

Not part of a series

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Publication Date

Aug 25, 2026

Page Length

78 pages

Available Formats

ePub and PDF

When the Wind has Teeth

Advance Reader Copy

Blurb

A debut collection about inheritance, survival, and what the storm leaves standing.

In When the Wind Has Teeth, Espann James moves through four movements of storm—Gale, Squall, Derecho, Calm—mapping what happens to a body when forces beyond its control arrive with intention.

These thirty-five poems reach from a grandmother's hands and a house on Atkinson Street to police lights that share their colors with fireworks, from red clay in the Carolina cold to a woman in a black dress rowing black water. They are vulnerable without being confessional, political without being polemical.

This is a debut about complicated inheritance: family, race, queerness, the South, and the slow work of learning to stand differently in the open air. The wind here bites and strips away. It also clears.

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