Please note: In order to keep Hive up to date and provide users with the best features, we are no longer able to fully support Internet Explorer. The site is still available to you, however some sections of the site may appear broken. We would encourage you to move to a more modern browser like Firefox, Edge or Chrome in order to experience the site fully.

Animal Joy : A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation, Paperback / softback Book

Animal Joy : A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation Paperback / softback

Paperback / softback

Description

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 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’s morphine addiction, Freud’s unfreudian behaviors, marriage brokers and war brokers to ‘Not Jokes’, Abu Ghraib, Fanon’s negrophobia, smut, the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, laugh tracks, the problem with adjectives, to how poetry can wake us up.

At the centre of the book, though, 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 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 spontaneity and feeling alive.

Information

Save 15%

£12.99

£10.95

 
Free Home Delivery

on all orders

 
Pick up orders

from local bookshops

Information