The Desk Was Already Here

<p><strong style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>The Desk Was Already</strong><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> </span><strong style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Here</strong><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> is the debut poetry collection from Shamon Lawrence a writer and educator answering a question Countee Cullen posed nearly a century ago: </span><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Why would God make a poet Black and bid him sing? </em><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>This collection is the song.</span></p><p></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Written in the quiet ache between classroom bells and long silences Lawrence reckons with the impact of structures that never asked him to speak. His poems trace the sacred architecture of desks. Those inherited assigned built over or broken down. Spanning from the desks where Black boys are told to be still to the ones where Black men are asked to perform miracles as teachers </span><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>The Desk Was Already</em><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> Here traces the sacred strained lineage between student and educator.</span></p><p></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>With nods to Hughes Cullen and the Black Baptist tradition Lawrence builds a lyrical record of what school never teaches but always enforces: the burden of where you're placed the pressure of what you're expected to become and the quiet acts of care that keep Black students and teachers going.</span></p><p></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>This collection is part hymn part indictment part field note from an educator who knows the difference between compliance and communion. In these pages the desk is not merely a setting but a witness. A relic. A wound. A calling.</span></p><p></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>In </span><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>The Desk Was Already</em><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> Here Lawrence dares to imagine what it means to teach to write and to live as if the desk were hallowed and to sing anyway.</span></p>