American poet Ruth Danon hates and fears the cold in all its forms - literal, metaphorical, external, internal. In Turn Up the Heat she ventures into the chill and explores as well as its problematic opposite. In poems that range widely in form and style and that travel through place and time, Danon introduces us to St. Anthony, who stole fire from the devil and heated the icy desert, and heretic and genius Giordano Bruno, whose prescient astronomical vision led him led him to be burned at the stake. As she moves from Renaissance Italy to modern Sardinia and frosty upstate New York, from the desert to the domestic, Danon's peregrinations occur within the context of our own times—of a planet grown increasingly hot, a pandemic as cruel as an inquisition, of hotheaded and often coldhearted politics of America, as she contends with personal loneliness, isolation, guilt, and longing. How, she asks us, can we make and find the fire that warms, sustains, and illumines us?
"Turn Up the Heat is a beautiful book, at turns tender, wry, and heartbreaking. Whether she's writing about growing older, or the challenges of domesticity, or the fickleness of the English language, Ruth Danon has created a hymn to our complex present and our anxious, unknowable future. These poems altered me as I was reading them, and they are going to continue to stay with me for a very long time.
— Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, author of American Estrangement
In her stark and truly remarkable new book, Turn Up the Heat, Ruth Danon reveals just how much is on edge, from the vast, incremental movements of time, space, and the weather to the tiniest fragile tendril or thread. These poems quite sensitively contend with damage, scarring, alarms, ruins, and forces that threaten relationships, desires, and life itself—including the icy threat of aging. Yet, there is mitigation - the happy swerve of an unexpected cat in the continuum. In her book Danon conjures stillness and rest in contrast to disquiet. In this the poet is aided by the occult powers of Giordano Bruno and St. Anthony of Egypt, bringing light and warmth to the physical and emotional desert she describes. A wondrous collection.
—Stephen Massimilla, author of Frank Dark
Ruth Danon's Turn Up the Heat is elegiac, edgy, and disquieting. The book takes its main threads from St. Anthony, the saint of lost things, and from Giordano Bruno, who was burned alive for believing in a heliocentric solar system. In articulating a new language to think about losses—in the form of feeling coldness and the cold—Danon takes on aging, the notion of freedom, the idea of bodily autonomy, and the physicality of the self-made real. This is a serious and effective book.
—Sean Singer, author of Today in the Taxi
Ruth Danon is a distinguished American poet and scholar. Her previous books include Word Has It (Nirala Series 2018), Limitless Tiny Boat (BlazeVOX, 2015), Triangulation from a Known Point (North Star Line, 1990), a chapbook, Living with the Fireman (Ziesing Brothers, 1980), and a book of literary criticism, Work in the English Novel (Croom-Helm, 1985), which was reissued by Routledge in 2021. Her poetry has appeared in several anthologies including Eternal Snow (Nirala, 2017), Resist Much, Obey Little (Spuyten Duyvil, 2017), Noon: An Anthology of Short Poems (Isobar Press, 2019), CAPS 20 Anthology (CAPS 2020), Stronger than Fear: Poems of Compassion, Empowerment and Social Justice (Cave Moon Press, 2022), and is forthcoming in the Poetry is Bread Anthology (Nirala, 2023).
Her work was selected by Robert Creeley for Best American Poetry, 2002. Her poetry and prose have appeared in Hayden's Ferry Review, the Florida Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Post Road, Versal, Mead, BOMB, the Paris Review, Fence, the Boston Review, 3rd Bed, Crayon, 2Horatio, Barrow Street, and many other publications in the U.S. and abroad. Danon has been a fellow at the Ragdale Foundation, the Corporation of Yaddo, the Ora Lerman Foundation, and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. For 23 years she taught in the creative and expository writing programs that she directed for The School of Professional Studies at New York University and was founding Director of their Summer Intensive Creative Writing Workshop. Those workshops ran from 1999 to 2016.
She is the founder of LIVE WRITING: A Project for the Reading, Writing, and Performance of Poetry, which has been operating since 2018. Before the pandemic she curated the Spring Street Reading Series for Atlas Studios in Newburgh. In 2021 she was co-curator of the Newburgh Literary Festival in Newburgh, NY and is currently one of the curators for the newly created Beacon LitFest, to be held in June of 2023.
Currently, she lives in Beacon, NY and teaches through LIVE WRITING and New York Writer's Workshop.
"Ruth Danon is a poet keenly aware of the way we construct and destroy the world through language. Like a child playing the Freudian game of fort-da, or the artist Louise Bourgeois 'undoing, redoing,' she gives us visions of life stripped down, of moon without sun, then lights small, red heaters. Time and again, wry, and even tragic resignation (In this desert I give up) leads surprisingly, often humorously, to an oasis in the quotidian, as in the recurrent image of golden butter gracing dry bread. Collapse actually becomes resurrection: in humble yet fierce, cockeyed and clearsighted celebrations of resilience, the speaker 'refuse[s] tragedy . . . easing [her] self into some sort of human compassion,' and the little cat, her sometime avatar, stops the anxious licking that's laid her bare. Because the poet does not shy from nakedness, darkness and cold, broken glass and ancient graves, Turn Up the Heat earns its epiphanies. You close this visionary book with a sense that things destroyed can also be put back together, that a fine and canny calibration of light in relation to dark may not rescue the planet but could save our souls." — Natania Rosenfeld,, author of The Blue Bed
"Turn Up The Heat, is Ruth Danon's fourth book of poetry. Her writing appears to be straight forward. The language can be ordinary. It is simple in the best possible meaning of that word. Then, one reads more slowly or reads a lot in one sitting and finds one's self looking for that other poem, already read, but now it is necessary to read it again." — Leslie Friedman, https://compulsivereader.com/2024/04/15/a-review-of-turn-up-the-heat-by-ruth-danon/
