Description

Graywolf Press, paperback

Publication Date: August 16, 2022

Publisher Marketing:An invigorating, continuously surprising book about the serious nature of laughter.

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 Joyseeks to recover the sensation of being present 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 un-Freudian behaviors, marriage brokers and war brokers, to Not Jokes, Abu Ghraib, Frantzs negrophobia, smut, the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, laugh tracks, the problem with adjectives, and how poetry can wake us up. At the center of the book, however, is the authors relationship with her daughters, who erupt into the text like sudden, unexpected laughter. These interventionsfrank, tender, and always a challenge to the writer and her thinkingare like tiny revolutions, pointedly showing the dangers of being severed from ones true self and hinting at ways one might be called back to it.

A bold and insatiably curious prose debut,Animal Joyis an ode to spontaneity and feeling alive.