Meniscus: Notes for the Painfully Alone

By Ayon Shahed

Meniscus is a debut poetry collection that inhabits the ambiguous space between closeness and distance-where intimacy nearly happens, where connection flickers, where solitude settles in. Moving through urban nights and quiet mornings, these poems trace the afterimages of love: bars and bedrooms, streetlights and smoke, fleeting encounters and long silences. Again and again, the speaker reaches toward others, toward memory, toward versions of the self shaped by longing-only to discover what remains after.
Dark and melancholic yet never fully resigned, Meniscus is animated by a stubborn tenderness: the belief that warmth can survive miscommunication, that naming the ache is its own form of reaching, and that small moments-observed closely-still carry beauty. Intimate, atmospheric, and emotionally exacting, this collection offers a language for modern longing and the quiet courage of feeling it fully.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1038359139
• ISBN13: 9781038359131
• Release Date: June 2026
• Publisher: FriesenPress
• Length: 156 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.5" x 8.5"