Shauna Barbosa

Shauna Barbosa was born in Boston to an Cape Verdean father and an African American mother. She received her MFA at Bennington College in Vermont, and currently teaches in the Writers' Workshop at UCLA Extension. Her poems have been published by numerous sources over the past decade, and her first collection of poems, 'Cape Verdean Blues', was released by Pitt Poetry Press in 2018, which was a finalist for the PEN Open Voices Award the following year.

'Cape Verdean Blues' is named for the 1966 album and title track 'The Cape Verdean Blues' by the famed jazz pianist Horace Silver, which itself was composed in honor of Silver's Cape Verdean father John Tavares Silva. This book similarly honors her father's homeland, along with her personal life and loves, the lives of working class people of Cape Verdean descent whom she encounters, and the beauty of that lush country.

One of my favorite poems in this collection honors the late Cape Verdean morna singer Cesária Évora:

To the Brothers of Cesária Évora

I’m at the jazz bar
staring at the saxophonist
looking for the entry wound.
My curated movements
are all pretend

darkness don’t equal depth.
He’s looking for mind, too.
Me too is not the same
as hang in there. All rhythm
no blue like swinging

arms are all form of measurement.
The sax to body position, dead skin
cells to household dust

flying across the world
doesn’t compare to noticing
your only bookmark is a pair
of scissors, to cut

means leaving the big tune.
No more pretend this place
smells how it looks outside
at dawn on September’s first
fresh

turning from hopeful to who
can I talk to alive or six-feet under.
Curated sendoff,

one last wound tune
for my brothers, all colors ranging
bread, coffee, blood sausage, and
gaslight. No one wants
a black mouth brother

I know, you don’t want to be
cause it’s difficult to be
black, and
brown mouth with a hopeful open
no more pretend not knowing
that speaking Portuguese
at the traffic stop
won’t save you.
________________________

The poems, like Cape Verde itself, are quite lyrical in their use of language, but unfortunately I did not fully connect with many of them on a first or second reading. As a result, I've given 'Cape Verdean Blues' a 3½ star rating for now, but I'll return to this collection and possibly increase my rating after I give her work another try.… (meer)