Turn Up the Heat: New Poems

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?

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?

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 Danton has created a hymn to our complex present and our anxious, unknowable future. . ."--Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, author of American Estrangement

"Ruth Danon's TURN UP THE HEAT is elegiac, edgy, and disquieting. . . 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 has found the courage to compose a poetry in which Judgment and Silence counterpoise upon the ground of one purpose: Truth. Like one of the tutelary spirits of this beautiful collection, Giordano Bruno, Danon is willing to risk everything upon a clear word, a keen observation, an honest statement. The result is the very opposite of austere; it is warm and welcoming."--Donald Revell, author of Drought-Adapted Vine

". . . These poems embody tricks of vision, quick-witted plays on words, 'the false and the true, the angel and devil, [standing] equal.' This book burns with hope, as 'white branches of birch trees trace bright lines against the oncoming dark.'"--Moira Egan, author of Synaethesium

". . . Her poems in this marvelous collection are dramas of integrity that offer no easy comfort and suggest how even mistakes can be profitable for the spirit."--Lee Upton, author of The Day Every Day Is

Poetry. Jewish Studies. Women's Studies.

Ruth Danon is the author of three previous books of poetry: Triangulation from A Known Point (North Star Line, 1990), LIMITLESS TINY BOAT (BlazeVOX, 2016), and WORD HAS IT (Nirala, 2018.) Her critical book, Work in the English Novel, was reissued by Routledge in 2021. She has published widely in the United States and abroad. Her work has been anthologized in Best American Poetry 2002, Resist Much, Obey Little, (2017), Stronger Than Fear: Poems of Empowerment, Compassion, and Social Justice (2022) and will appear in the Poetry is Bread Anthology. She is founder of Live Writing: A Project for the Reading, Writing and Performance of Poetry. She teaches through Live Writing and for New York Writers Workshop. Since retiring from New York University in 2017 she has lived in Beacon, New York.