About the Author\nNuar Alsadir is a psychoanalyst and the author of the poetry collections Fourth Person Singular, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Forward Prize, and More Shadow Than Bird. She lives in New York City.\nAn invigorating, continuously surprising book about the serious nature of laughter.\nLaughter 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 being present 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 un-Freudian behaviors, marriage brokers and war brokers, to “Not Jokes,” Abu Ghraib, Frantz’s negrophobia, smut, the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, 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―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.\nA bold and insatiably curious prose debut, Animal Joy is an ode to spontaneity and feeling alive.

Animal Joy: A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation

Humor & Entertainment

Alsadir, Nuar

Humor

Graywolf Press

Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2017 A Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry Claudia Rankine described the poems in Alsadir's first book as 'lawless,' 'provocative, and 'heartbreaking' as they 'converse from the inside out...come alive in the back and forth of a mind attempting to understand what it means to be in relation to.' Fourth Person Singular continues to blow open the relationship between self and world in a working through of lyric shame, bending poetic form through fragment, lyric essay, aphorisms mined from the unconscious, and pop-up associations, to explore the complexities, congruities, disturbances - as well as the beauty - involved in self-representation in language. As unexpected as it is bold, Alsadir's ambitious tour de force demands we pay new attention to the current conversation about the nature of lyric - and human relationships - in the 21st century.

Fourth Person Singular (Pavilion Poetry)

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

Pavilion Poetry

The poems in "More Shadow Than Bird" are imagistic narratives of emotional situations that offer not the story of a life, but of the consciousness accompanying the life lived. This consciousness, even as it operates on a more symbolic level, is embodied-not abstract or removed- conveying a sense of rawness and honesty that is rare in non-representational work.

More Shadow Than Bird (Salt American Poets)

Salt Publishing

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Books by Alsadir, Nuar