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.

Original and ambitious poetry that makes readers pay attention to the current conversation about the nature of lyric and human relationships in the 21st century.

A Time Must-Read Book of 2022 A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2022 Aster(ix) Journal's 12 Best Nonfiction Books of 2022 An invigorating, continuously surprising book about the serious nature of laughter. 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 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. A bold and insatiably curious prose debut, Animal Joy is an ode to spontaneity and feeling alive.

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. The quirky perspective and musical surface of these poems makes them engaging— deceptively catchy, even— as a mysterious darkness tows from beneath to draw the reader deeper in. This consciousness, even as it operates on a more philosophical level, is embodied—not abstract or removed— conveying a sense of rawness and honesty that is rare in non-representational work.

From bestselling author of The Book of Delights and award-winning poet, a book of lyrical mini-essays celebrating the everyday that will inspire readers to rediscover the joys in the world around us. In Ross Gay’s new collection of small, daily wonders, again written over the course of a year, one of America’s most original voices continues his ongoing investigation of delight. For Gay, what delights us is what connects us, what gives us meaning, from the joy of hearing a nostalgic song blasting from a passing car to the pleasure of refusing the “nefarious” scannable QR code menus, from the tiny dog he fell hard for to his mother baking a dozen kinds of cookies for her grandchildren. As always, Gay revels in the natural world—sweet potatoes being harvested, a hummingbird carousing in the beebalm, a sunflower growing out of a wall around the cemetery, the shared bounty from a neighbor’s fig tree—and the trillion mysterious ways this glorious earth delights us. The Book of (More) Delights is a volume to savor and share.

Let Martone guide you through every inch of the amazing state that is home to the Hoosier Infidelity Resort Area, the site of Wendell Willkie's Ascension into Heaven, and the Annual Eyeless Fish Fry. All your questions will be answered, including many you never thought to ask (like: "What's a good recipe for Pork Cake?")."--BOOK JACKET.

From freemining in the Forest of Dean to the policies underpinning the green transition, the history of energy in Israel to the repressed desires behind boredom, the spring issue of Granta examines a practice as old as human history: Extraction. With reportage from James Pogue and Anjan Sundaram, and pieces from Thea Riofrancos, Laleh Khalili, Nuar Alsadir among others, the non-fiction in this issue moves across time and place to uncover the confrontations that break out in the face of extraction. Fiction follows a similar theme, and the issue also includes a new story from Camilla Grudova, featuring a clinic where patients learn to physically expel their unrequited desires, as well as stories by Rachel Kushner, Benjamin Kunkel, Carlos Fonseca, Christian Lorentzen and Eka Kurniawan.