Description
Animal Joy is an ode to spontaneity and feeling alive. In her invigorating, continuously surprising book about the serious nature of laughter, 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,” 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 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.
Nuar Alsadir is a poet, nonfiction writer, and psychoanalyst. She is the author of Animal Joy; Fourth Person Singular, which was shortlisted for the 2017 Forward Prize for Best Collection in England and in Ireland and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry; and More Shadow Than Bird. Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including The Paris Review, Granta, New York Times Magazine, Slate, Kenyon Review, and Ploughshares. She appears on Showtime’s docuseries, Couples Therapy, as one of the psychoanalysts in the peer supervision group, in the third, fourth and fifth seasons. She lives in New York City, where she works as a psychoanalyst in private practice.
