Animal Joy: A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation

Laughter shakes us out of our deadness. An outburst of spontaneous laughter is an eruption from the unconscious that, like political resistance, poetry, or self-revelation, expresses a provocative, impish drive to burst free from external constraints. Taking laughters revelatory capacity as a starting point, and rooted in Nuar Alsadirs experience as a poet and psychoanalyst, Animal Joy seeks to recover the sensation of feeling alive and embodied.

Writing in a poetic, associative style, blending the personal with the theoretical, Alsadir ranges from her experience in clown school, Anna Kareninas morphine addiction, Freuds unfreudian behaviors, marriage brokers and war brokers to Not Jokes, Abu Ghraib, Fanons negrophobia, smut, the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, laugh tracks, the problem with adjectives, to how poetry can wake us up. At the centre of the book, though, is the authors relationship with her daughters, who erupt into the text like sudden, unexpected laughter. These interventions frank, tender, and always a challenge to the writer and her thinking are like tiny revolutions, pointedly showing the dangers of being severed from our True Self and hinting at ways we might be called back to it. A bold and insatiably curious prose debut, Animal Joy is an ode to spontaneity and feeling alive.