Zion Square

"The music rips the skein of being. The ghost is proudly silent.

A triumph of difference. Discordant and defiant."



Maxim D. Shrayer's voice speaks across generations. With a stubborn belief that poetry must be healing, Shrayer writes poems that break through boundaries and fears, accept defeat, and yearn for pleasure.

-David Biespiel, author of A Self-Portrait in the Year of the High Commission on Love

The memories [Shrayer] carries burn in carefully crafted verses as if to contain his furies and his love. ... These are poems to savor and to learn.

-Rodger Kamenetz, author of The Missing Jew: Poems 1976-2022

Maxim D. Shrayer's Zion Square is a book of unabashed loyalties, outspoken in its political commitments, at moments bitingly satiric, at others, tender.

-Natania Rosenfeld, author of The Blue Bed

These haunted poems movingly try to make sense of our current world that is, Shrayer passionately reminds us, seeped in tragedy.

-Yerra Sugarman, author of Aunt Bird