<p>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, <em>Animal Joy</em> seeks to recover the sensation of feeling alive and embodied. </p><p>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 lau