Animal joy : : a Book of Laughter and Resuscitation

Locations
Call Number: 152.43 Al, Adult Book / Nonfiction / Literary Arts / Essays / Alsadir, Nuar
On Shelf At: Downtown Library, Malletts Creek Branch

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	152.43 Al	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Malletts Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Nonfiction / Literary Arts / Essays / Alsadir, Nuar	4-week checkout	On Shelf

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.

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