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 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 Karenina-s morphine addiction, Freud-s unfreudian behaviors, marriage brokers and war brokers to -Not Jokes-, Abu Ghraib, Fanon-s 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 author-s relationship with her daughters, who erupt into the text like sudden, unexpected lau
