Shauna Barbosa’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Lenny Letter, Virginia Quarterly Review, the Awl, Colorado Review, No Tokens Journal, the Atlas Review, PANK, and others. She received her MFA from Bennington College.
"Equal measures heart and bravado, Barbosa captures a present
moment in U.S. poetry." --Booklist
"It was tough to pick a top book in 2018 but I'm going to have to
go with Kendrick Lamar on this one and say Shauna Barbosa's poetry
collection, Cape Verdean Blues, topped my list. These poems make
bodily experiences feel spiritual while also exploring the concerns
of someone whose identity lives between two cultures. I've always
been a fan of reflecting on those moments or people in life that
come and go quickly but leave behind detailed traces of emotion.
Barbosa extracts these delicate traces and places them within her
words. The collection does what poetry is meant to do, move you."
--Melissa Ximena Golebiowski, Lit Hub national assigning editor
"Cape Verdean Blues sings its pleasures and its pains. Delighting
in the possibilities of linguistic play and undeniable rhythm,
Barbosa's urgent and intoxicating poems honor the poet's past even
as they fashion and refashion a shifting, irreducibly complex, and
irrepressible identity that slyly slips our hold." --Kathleen
Graber, author of The Eternal City: poems
"In her strong debut, Barbosa delves into how the nuances of
identity are formed through intersecting struggles. She
characterizes identity as mutable, flexible, and a means to keep
the memories that shape a person. Writing of her Cape Verdean
upbringing in Boston, Barbosa investigates what it means to be a
woman of color and a cultural other: "While I study my aunt makes a
few bucks with no English at the Au Bon Pain in Harvard Square.
She's sweeping like it's a Saturday morning in her Cape Verdean
home." In Barbosa's poems, the act of remembering can spur
self-reflection as well as a political epiphany. In "An Email
Recovered from Trash," Barbosa contends with dating as a black
woman: "Can you tell from my name, I'm still in search of a place
to stay?" It seems that even when Barbosa wants to momentarily
forget about otherness, the outside world serves as a constant
reminder. Yet she finds an inner peace, writing 'My noise so
liberating/ it asks to be no one.' For Barbosa, the memories that
are a minefield can also become a haven; those aspects of identity
that arise through conflict can serve as a source of exceptional
strength. " --Publishers Weekly
"These words feel like experiences. Some are personal, most are
enlightening, but all connect. Connect on higher Level. A spiritual
level." --Kendrick Lamar, Grammy Award-winning artist, and winner
of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Music
"This is a book harried by the wraiths of American power and
culture, a book of the splitting possibilities of self and of love
gone ridiculous, of the terrible and ongoing orthodoxy of the
internet, of the largesse and murder committed by the ocean and by
the calendar itself. And Shauna Barbosa's jet-pilot of a speaker
stays calm in the cock-pit, radioing in the damage. 'Quiet are the
dead these days, yeah?' she asks. But by the time you reach the end
of Cape Verdean Blues, dear reader, the dead aren't quiet any
longer." --Joshua Bell
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