“Marc Gaba meditates on the nature of aesthetic beauty with an almost clinical passion, weaving expertly among the emblems of Christianity as well as Marie Curie, Watson & Crick, and other secular icons of the modern moment. Have shimmers, a tapestry hanging from the stone wall of faith, or more precisely, from an idea of faith, inside of which ‘what must you forgive’ and ‘what you would forgive’ wrestle.… (A) gorgeous debut.”—G. C. Waldrep

“With its steady and compelling exactitudes, Marc Gaba’s Have calls to mind the poetry of George Herbert, where lineation is both a form and a subject, a meditation on lines in their ubiquitous though no less mysterious generations of relation and rupture. Where Herbert’s linear tropes—hold-fast, pulley, wreath, rope, cage, cable, and so on—feel for the contours of absolute indebtedness—We must confesse that nothing is our own…That all things were more ours by being his—in Gaba’s poems, the physical-metaphysical ‘fold’ is conjured through a painstaking attention to line as ultimate paradox, i.e. that which joins in the very act of dividing. To have is to be constantly halved, cut into subject and object in every act of perception. To have—to own or possess—is equally to be subject to experience. The “tireless symmetries” a line interposes—through diptych, groove, wound, gash, door, shore, slit, veil—prompt agonistic and ludic responses in turn. Through Gaba’s freshening ear, a tiresome joke sounds a haunting theological query: Knock knock / Who’s there / Who. The poetic line, in Gaba’s hands, is both the door and the knock, the barrier, and the means of admission. A sentence changes its grammar midway, self-interruptive, self-mending, as if to seize a passage between ‘air and air.’ Disorientation and divestment prevail. Where what why who. Not ours nothing nowhere no one’s. Gaba is a pilgrim in the sense I respect most: a peregrine, a poet not afraid of the play between assertion and error—what wanders outside calculation. What alters the altar. What goes in search of free worship.”—Sarah Gridley