Editorial Review For Meniscus:
Notes for the Painfully Alone
In Meniscus: Notes for
the Painfully Alone, Ayon Shahed follows the desire for closeness through
moments of intimacy and hours spent alone. The poems move through affection,
grief, and the uncertainty of reaching toward another person. Their speakers
revisit encounters and search for a way to live with memory. Questions about
faith and belonging extend the collection’s reach. Across coffee shops, train
stations, and bedrooms, Shahed considers what it means to share a life while
remaining separate within it.
Shahed gives connection a setting that readers can picture.
In The Space Between Us, affection
takes shape through attention to a beloved’s breath and movement. The Best Places finds companionship in
diner coffee and friends who understand. In Ezra’s
Pound, the speaker watches other customers talk and laugh as the room’s
mood shifts. These details let readers follow the feeling through what the
speaker notices.
The title gains meaning in Residue II, where Shahed turns it into a verb for clinging. That
image runs through the collection’s concern with attachment. These poems turn
the strain of holding on into something readers can feel. The speakers examine
their part in that strain, admitting hesitation and the urge to turn
possibility into love. In I Want to Miss
You, a speaker imagines grieving a relationship from within it. The
admission gives the poem its intimacy.
The humor earns its place through timing. Towels makes a joke out of advice about
laundry. Even laundry comes with someone else’s rules. In Drifting Lament I, the speaker boils tomorrow’s prospects down to a
complaint. Shahed understands the value of a pause, and the Drifting Lament pieces let a sentence
hold the page. That timing brings the reader close to a voice that knows how to
laugh at itself.
Solitude also takes different forms. In Closer, the speaker asks loneliness for company on the walk home
after the strain of being among others. In Awake,
a night alone opens into a wish to be known and a fear of exposure. Speech
patterns and shifts in line length bring the reader into the act of thinking.
The poems offer company to readers considering their own need for intimacy,
distance, or belonging.
Meniscus gives
readers language for the feelings that keep returning. Shahed earns that
connection through attention to the wish to know another person and be known in
return. In the poem that ends the book, the thought of someone returns within a
sentence. The ending leaves that act of remembering with the reader. For
readers who keep revisiting a goodbye, this collection deserves a place within
reach.