Laughter shakes us out of our deadness. An outburst of spontaneous laughteris an eruption from the unconscious that, like political resistance, poetry, orself-revelation, expresses a provocative, impish drive to burst free from externalconstraints. Taking laughter’s revelatory capacity as a starting point,and rooted in Nuar Alsadir’s experience as a poet and psychoanalyst, AnimalJoy 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'smorphine addiction, Freud’s unfreudian behaviors, marriage brokers and warbrokers to ‘Not Jokes’, Abu Ghraib, Fanon’s negrophobia, smut, the BrettKavanaugh hearings, laugh tracks, the problem with adjectives, to how poetrycan wake us up. At the centre of the book, though, is the author’s relationshipwith her daughters, who erupt into the text like sudden, unexpected laughter.These interventions - frank, tender, and always a challenge to the writer andher thinking - are like tiny revolutions, pointedly showing the dangers of beingsevered from our True Self and hinting at ways we might be called back to it.

A bold and insatiably curious prose debut, Animal Joy is an ode to spontaneityand feeling alive.

‘To read Animal Joy is to become alive to the condition of wakefulness in the world…This is a work that will change conversations about who we are, what we think motivates us, what makes us us.’ - Claudia Rankine, author of Citizen