000			01791nam a2200169Ia 4500
001			4802
008			250217s9999 xx 000 0 und d
020			_a9781644450932
100			_aAlsadir, Nuar _96771
245		0	_aAnimal Joy: A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation/ _cNuar Alsadir
260			_bGraywolf Press; _c2022
300			_a320p; _c21x14cm
520			_aLaughter 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.
546			_aEnglish
650			_aBF1-990 Psychology _91315
942			_cBK
999			_c4802 _d4802