Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
"Few things feel as important right now as what Nuar Alsadir is thinking about in her brilliant new book. She considers the ways in which, despite our most determined curation of our public-faces, and despite our approval-seeking and plain old quotidian bullshittery, laughter reveals to us (and sometimes others) what we might really feel. What happens when we wonder beneath or into that unexpected chortle or snort, that losing it, that dying, when we spend a little curious time with what, in fact, beyond sanction or affirmation, moves us? Re-makes us animal to ourselves? I'm not exactly sure, but I have a hunch that for lack of what is found there we die miserably every day. Nuar Alsadir has written such a beautiful and important book." Ross Gay, author of Be Holding and The Book of Delights
Review
"[Animal Joy] is vulnerable, lyrical, and refreshingly incisive….Alsadir's quiet wit and depth of knowledge lead to unique insights and profound self-reflection." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"Gorgeously written and by turns hilarious and crushing, Alsadir's examination of humanity's 'savage complexity' is not to be missed." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
About the Author
Nuar Alsadir is a psychoanalyst and the author of the poetry collections Fourth Person Singular, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Forward Prize, and More Shadow Than Bird. She lives in New York City.