Description
Title: Animal Joy: A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation
Author: Nuar Alsadir
ISBN: 9781644450932
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 2022
Binding: Paperback
Language: English
Number of Pages: 320
Condition Note: Excellent, unmarked copy with little wear and tight binding. We ship in recyclable American-made mailers. 100% money-back guarantee on all orders.
Publisher :
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.
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