Cape Verdean Blues

December 18, 2017
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. Agent: Jack Jones Literary Arts.

March 15, 2018
Barbosa's debut book of poetry speaks from both sides of the Atlantic in the voice of a young bravura New Yorker anchored to her family in Cape Verde, a volcanic archipelago off the west coast of Africa. Barbosa uses her fresh poetics and twenty-first-century swagger to critique a complex relationship with the former island colony. In one poem, the speaker's grandmother shouts at her in Kriolu, a Portuguese-based creole, and the recipient of this outburst notes the intensity of that quick phone call: I love how it sounds to be loved so fiercely in another language. The hard ways of strong women apply to life in the U.S. in one of the book's most strikingly short poems: I made myself my mother. / Then I made myself yours. The speaker also remains pointedly aware of the dangers posed by imbalanced race relations. Equal measures heart and bravado, Barbosa captures a present moment in U.S. poetry, with references to GPS, the internet, and the drawn-out existential crises of her generation: Am I a millennial or am I dead. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)