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51
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
26/100Critics
75/100Scholars
Author:
Nuar Alsadir
Publisher:
Graywolf Press
Date:
August 16, 2022
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 is an ode to spontaneity and feeling alive.
What The Reviewers Say
At once prose poem, manifesto, sociological study and therapy session. Poet and psychoanalyst Nuar Alsadir’s first nonfiction book advocates the liberating power of spontaneity, curiosity, humor. The book practices what it preaches. The exposition jumps for intellectual joy, hopscotching from literary criticism to philosophy and psychology to political analysis.
Enthralling.
Ruminative.
Animal Joy is Alsadir’s ode to the bodily sensations that escape us, told through bursts of fragmented memories, jokes and psychoanalysis. Like any good clown, Alsadir shakes the reader from their stupor in order to intrigue, repulse and, most importantly, entertain..
