December 2023 Book Commentary

Animal Joy: A Book of Laughter
By Nuar Alsadir

“A spectacular achievement that will change conversations about who we are, what we think
motivates us, what makes us us ….Read this book. “ –Claudia Rankine

Laughter shakes us out of our deadness. An outburst of spontaneous laughter is an eruption
from the unconscious that 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.
In this bold and insatiably curious prose debut, 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, Fanon’s negrophobia, smut, the Brett Kavanaugh
hearings, laugh tracks, the problem with adjectives, to how poetry can wake us up. At the
center of the book are the author’s 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.
Reading this book you are on a joyride with the mind of a free thinker who will surprise you,
make you laugh uncontrollably and trouble you until you come out changed. You will gain a
different relationship to what is before you, less tolerant of the lies and defenses that keep us
apart from the impulse of our true self, joys, excitement, and devastations.

Nuar Alsadir, a poet and psychoanalyst, is the author of Fourth Person Singular, a finalist for the
National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry and the Forward Prize for Best Collection, and More
Shadow Than Bird. She lives in New York City.