``Cape Verdean Blues sings its pleasures and its pains.
Delighting in the possibilities of linguistic play and undeniable rhythm, Shauna 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. ``Cape Verdean Blues sings its pleasures and its pains