A Time Must-Read Book of 2022
A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2022
Aster(ix) Journal's 12 Best Nonfiction Books of 2022
**
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 laughter's
revelatory capacity as a starting point, and rooted in Nuar Alsadir's
experience as a poet and psychoanalyst, Animal Joy seeks 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 Karenina's morphine
addiction, Freud's un-Freudian behaviors, marriage brokers and war
brokers, to "Not Jokes," Abu Ghraib, Frantz's 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
author's 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 one's
true self and hinting at ways one might be called back to it.
A bold and insatiably curious prose debut, Animal Joy is an ode to
spontaneity and feeling alive.
