Selected by Mark Irwin for the 2015 Patricia Bibby First Book Award, Habitat of Stones charts the borderlands between various gods and their creations: the masks and machines, stories and visions, that sometimes outstrip their inventors.
Praise for Habitat of Stones
‘In Ezra Dan Feldman’s luminously postmodern Habitat of Stones, “omens are aerial,” clouds thicken – in a deliciously precise observation – “like marble cake,” and “the arrogant man” (having “mistaken a bathtub for a grave”) discovers that love’s true catastrophe is when it brings equanimity. He hopes, in a line that gives this brilliant collection its title, “to restore the natural habitat of stones.” And thus is the poetry in this startling debut collection – clear, without giving up its mystery, ferociously whimsical, the wry and gorgeous language taking us places we’d never imagine without Feldman’s bold and capacious vision.’
— Cynthia Hogue, author of Revenance
‘Exposing patriarchal and capitalistic practices that often cripple society, Ezra Dan Feldman’s Habitat of Stones reveals the symptoms of living in a post-industrial and illusional, high-tech world: “He’s taken the world for a machine, a baby for a doll, a gun for a candy bar, which he offered to everyone. He once mistook a hammer for his own hand. Once he made love to a wall.”
‘Finally, Habitat of Stones directs us back to the natural world that recharges the human psyche, where a limb touched “touches you back / electrically; you’ll feel it moving in itself ten billion times / faster than a continental shelf.”‘
— Mark Irwin