When the Wind Has Teeth

WHEN THE WIND HAS TEETH James Edward Spann

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 hard-won stillness.

Spann 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.

What emerges is a voice that is vulnerable without confession, political without polemic. Spann's formal range—from compressed cinquains to expansive multi-page narratives—serves a vision both intimate and unflinching. These are poems about what it means to weather forces beyond your control, and how we learn to stand differently in the open air.