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. 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   Ruth Danon’s Turn Up the Heat is a collection of delectable equivocations, of cerebral, soul-searching poems, buzzing with enticing details ranging from a “two-faced stove,” and “men falling out of beds,” to “white rice, / waiting in a small pot.” Readers will find themselves, off-kilter, led to puzzling things out, wondering if we, too, may have “gambled on the wrong saint” in this life. These are poems of nourishment and exile, of domestic transit, as “so many little earths/orbit the plate /around red radishes that burn the throat.”  That burning and the poet’s fear of cold are recurring tropes, one as fierce and penetrating as Robert Frost’s fire and ice. And when the poet soberly admits her fears, “because my mind is right,” we think of Lowell, with the opposite sentiment. But here, we are chilled, and awed, and awake in the poetry she makes of this awareness, a poetry entirely her own.   --  Elaine Sexton, author of Drive   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                       "We live in a time in which Judgment has fallen into disrepute and in which Silence is misconstrued as consent to all sorts of atrocity. Nevertheless, 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   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 ageing. 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   Turn Up the Heat indeed, and learn from this elemental, elegiac collection by Ruth Danon. Follow Danon to a bonfire in Sardegna, which leads to thoughts of the heroic heretic, Giordano Bruno, burned at the stake, and then to our own, contemporary burnings. The heat of desire, the danger of black ice, the sagacity-gathering process of “edging into age.” 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 Synæsthesium    Ruth Danon invites us to meet the devil and wonders about the best approach: “will I spit or / will I chew?” What a wild question! She writes poems that reverberate, not zipping up her lines but casting forward and doubling back, pressing hard on each word until our perceptions shift. 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. “Yes, I was wanting my own messy future,” she writes. It’s when her poems seem to be especially quiet that you realize she’s imagining how best to sneak up on the devil. --  Lee Upton, author of The Day Every Day Is A work of subtle resistance, Ruth Danon’s Turn up the Heat is a poetic pilgrimage
that travels through the heart of uncertainty to compassionate acceptance of one’s internal universe, the world, and its mysterious ways. Whether addressing a need to not beafraid--of the cold, death, the death of the Earth, or running out of butter – the speaker’s willingness to let herself turn silver and amazed that makes these poems insist and burn.Just as burning is a form of yearning--and yearning akin to ache--Turn Up the Heat, is infusedwith a wisdom and deep humility that invites you to make do with what you have while staying open to surprise. --Tina Cane, author of Body of Work and Year of the Murder Hornet