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'Zion Square': New poetry from Maxim D. Shrayer
Zion Square, a new poetry collection, is described as “a book of war, love, despair, and mourning,” by its author, Professor of Russian, English, and Jewish Studies Maxim D. Shrayer.
Shrayer worked on the poems while violence and conflict raged in Ukraine—the birthland of his grandfathers and maternal grandmother—and Shrayer’s spiritual homeland of Israel, places that hold deep meaning for him, his ancestors, and descendants.
Zion Square is “a meditation on writing about wars while living between languages and cultures,” he said. The collection took its final shape after a 2024 trip to Israel, where Shrayer lectured, gave readings, volunteered, and spent time with family and friends.
The book comprises 30 shorter and longer poems on universal themes, in three sections titled “My Woven Kipa” (which includes the book’s title poem “Zion Square,” the focal point of cultural life in downtown Jerusalem), “Verses about a Burned Passport,” and “Peculiarities of the National Pilgrimage.” It includes English versions of three poems Shrayer first wrote in Russian, but mainly poems he composed in English, during 2023-2025.
“I really like the way ‘Zion Square’ refers not only to a famous place in Jerusalem but also to a meeting place of Jewish ideas about the world,” Shrayer said. “I hope my collection is such a literary meeting place.”
A review in Jewish Journal said the collection “contains the pain and dreams of a Jew with his heart in Israel, roots in Europe, and branches in the United States.”
“I think there is room in our culture for more poetry that deals with the roots of some of today’s biggest conflicts,” Shrayer said in a Cape Cod Chronicle interview. “Among the people who can shed light on these conflicts are immigrant poets who are between worlds, who are rooted in two worlds. Poets who, like myself, came from the former Soviet empire but have made a life here in America—and also in the English language.”
The volume has received accolades from Shrayer’s literary peers.
David Biespiel, author of A Self-Portrait in the Year of the High Commission on Love, said that “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.”
“The memories [Shrayer] carries burn in carefully crafted verses as if to contain his furies and his love,” said Rodger Kamenetz, author of The Missing Jew: Poems 1976-2022. “These are poems to savor and to learn.”
Natania Rosenfeld (The Blue Bed) described Zion Square as “a book of unabashed loyalties, outspoken in its political commitments, at moments bitingly satirical, at others, tender,” while Yerra Sugarman (Aunt Bird) said, “These haunted poems movingly try to make sense of our current world that is, Shrayer passionately reminds us, seeped in tragedy.”
Published in October 2025 by Ben Yehuda Press, the book is dedicated to Shrayer’s father David Shrayer-Petrov, a writer, medical doctor, and a refusenik activist who passed away in 2024.
“His departure created an incredible void, and writing poems, both in Russian and in English, was one of the few things I could meaningfully do as a writer for the entire summer after his death,” Shrayer said in a “Books Q&A” interview.
“The new book ends with the poem ‘Mourning,’ in which I expressed my sense of loss and my hope that memory is stronger than death.”
Its final line reads: “There’s no end to lineage/as long as there’s memory and universal language.”
Shrayer, a bilingual writer and translator, has published more than 30 books, including memoirs, a novella collection, biography and criticism, travelogues, and poetry collections. His works have been translated into 13 languages. Read more at shrayer.com.