When the Wind Has Teeth
An Arc Review
3/7/20264 min read
When the Wind Has Teeth is a rather vivid and visceral poetry collection that moves through several heavy topics such as grief, memory, family, identity, and violence. The collection uses the language of storms as a loose framework, and is divided into four sections: Gale, Squall, Derecho, and Calm. Rather than making the storms themselves the centre of the collection, the imagery seems to work more as a way of giving shape to emotional turbulence, instability and the aftermath of difficult experiences.
A lot of the collection's strength comes from its imagery. There is a strong emphasis on the physical and sensory, with bodies, memories, houses, weather, and various forms of violence appearing throughout the poems. At its cleanest, this makes even some of the heavier subjects feel tangible rather than overly abstract. The writing is often raw, and there are quite a few images throughout the collection that are genuinely striking
The collection is at its best, though, when it is a little more vague and willing to leave things unresolved. "Brown Paper Bags," "The Shape of Her Hands," "The World Burns Politely," "Swallowtail," and "The House on Atkinson Street" were particular highlights, partly because they don't always feel the need to entirely explain themselves. The ambiguity in some of these pieces tends to make them feel more intimate rather than less clear.
That approach isn't always consistent throughout the collection. Certain poems can feel a little too direct or blunt, particularly when an emotion or idea is explained after the imagery has already communicated it. There are also moments where the visceral quality of the writing starts to feel slightly overworked. The collection clearly has an interest in intensity, and this can work very well, but some of the stronger images might have had more impact if they had simply been left alone. At times, a poem seems to reach for one more emphatic statement when the image immediately before it was already doing enough.
This is perhaps the most noticeable tension in the collection: the imagery is often strong enough to carry more weight than the poems sometimes allow it to. The strongest moments tend to be the ones where the language remains slightly open-ended, allowing an image to suggest rather than declare. Elsewhere, that ambiguity is replaced with more explicit reflection, and the poems can lose some of the tension that made their imagery interesting in the first place. It is not that the more direct poems are necessarily ineffective, but they often feel less distinctive than the quieter ones.
I also appreciated how physically present the poems often feel. Even when they are dealing with things like grief, memory, or identity, there is usually something concrete for the reader to hold onto. Bodies and their various parts recur frequently, as do objects and places, giving the collection a grounded quality despite the range of subjects it covers. This helps keep some of its more abstract concerns from floating too far away from lived experience.
The divisions between the four sections don't always feel dramatically different from one another, though, and the collection maintains a fairly consistent emotional atmosphere throughout. There is a broad range of subjects within that atmosphere, so the progression between sections can occasionally feel less distinct than the titles suggest. At the same time, the recurring storm imagery gives the collection a loose sense of cohesion, particularly as different forms of emotional upheaval and its aftermath continue to surface throughout the book.
There are poems here that feel genuinely moving, alongside others that don't quite land as well. The collection occasionally reaches for a level of emotional intensity that might have been more effective with a little more subtlety, but its strongest pieces show a good instinct for atmosphere and detail. The writing is at its most memorable when it resists the urge to make every feeling completely legible and instead lets an image linger long enough for its significance to emerge naturally.
Overall, When the Wind Has Teeth is a slightly uneven collection, but one with several genuinely memorable highs. Its imagery can be beautiful, unsettling, and occasionally quite haunting. While some pieces could have used more restraint, there is plenty here for readers who enjoy visceral, imagery-driven poetry and collections that are willing to engage with difficult subjects without shying away from their physicality.
Rating: 3.4/5
Thank you to Espann James for sharing a copy of When the Wind Has Teeth with Fluorescent Magazine. If you'd like to explore the collection yourself, When the Wind Has Teeth is available in trade paperback and ebook through Sūtra House for $18.00 and $12.99 respectively, published August 25, 2026. You can purchase this collection via this link.
About the author:
Espann James is an award-winning designer, educator, and speaker known for his voice that is both intimate and arresting. His writing reads like a living journal—joyful, painful, curious, and unflinchingly honest. That commitment to personal truth fuels his work on the page and on the stage, where he speaks with quiet conviction and invites audiences into spaces free of judgment, open to reflection, dialogue, and self-discovery. Stitching together imagination, history, and identity, his work explores the interior landscapes of thought, feeling, and memory, transforming individual experience into something unmistakably universal.
He has written and performed at poetry events and festivals across North Carolina and has contributed design-focused writing and brand governance for graphic and UX design within the government sector. In every discipline, his work is rooted in one belief: storytelling, in all its forms, is a bridge connecting people to themselves and to one another.