Sea, Poison

Caren Beilin

Book cover for Sea, Poison
Image for variant 9780811239516
Book cover for Sea, Poison
Image for variant 9780811239516

Sea, Poison

Sea, Poison

Caren Beilin

View full details

Description

Cumin Baleen is a forty-one-year-old writer living in Philadelphia--this city of hospitals--who works at the upscale grocery Sea & Poison and is navigating the onset of an autoimmune condition. To start a medication that may help, an eye exam is required and this leads to a nightmarish laser eye surgery. The laser shoots into her brain, making her language spare and her sentences clause-less, a vexing constraint that stalls her book on gynecological malpractice: she wants others, in the realm of our for-profit medical industry that "renders the Hippocratic Oath its opposite," to see poison.

Meanwhile, Cumin is kicked out of her boyfriend Mari's studio after he falls for Janine, their landlord, and starts renting a closet in Maron's bedroom--polyamorous Maron who is hooking up with Alix, whom Cumin lusts after. Disheveled from medicines and medical scams, Cumin declares, "I don't know what to say, I'm saying I have a cracked appearance. It's not a pity party, it's a character sketch. Insofar as you'll need to be looking at me, that your mind should fill me up with its own swaying cognitive and toxic reeds if we are to do this, your imagination should touch me with its ridiculous poison."

Caren Beilin's hypnotic and fractured story is at once an homage to Shusaku Endo's terrifying novel of human vivisection The Sea and Poison and the spirit of OuLipo, the pioneering French writing group that sought new literary potential through constraints.

Critical Reviews

"Caren Beilin is one of the most bizarre and fearless writers of her generation."--Catherine Lacey

"I was instantly won over by Beilin's writing--so funny and serious and playful. Her books have the natural authority of those artworks that are strictly, rigorously themselves."--Sheila Heti "The Paris Review"

A surreal critique of the medical industry's subterfuge and villainy... Beilin buoys her sea with tongue-in-cheek wit as well as humor.--Jillian Damiani "Compulsive Reader"

"It's not often I read a work and want to know, simply, how. How did the writer write this?"--Patrick Cottrell "LA Review of Books"

Beilin's exhilarating second novel (after Revenge of the Scapegoat) portrays a writer's struggle to progress with her work after eye surgery. Beilin employs a host of narrative tricks to reflect her unsettled state, including sudden time shifts, a dose of metafiction, and Oulipian constraints such as Cumin's rewriting of a passage from Shusaku Endo's novel The Sea and Poison without using any of the letters from the word uterus. Above all its tricks, this rewarding and uncompromising novel is distinguished by its deliriously wild writing. It's impossible not to be swept up in Beilin's wake.-- "Publishers Weekly (starred)"

Sea, Poison is a deeply weird read - unsettling and funny in turn. The daily frustrations of creative life, the generative power of constraints, the failure of the US healthcare and housing systems, a donkey that somehow resembles Daniel Day-Lewis: it's all in there.--Cassie Packard "Frieze"

What a spirited and liberated performance... This novel charmed me from first word to last.--Ron Slate "On the Seawall"

Beilin, wizard that she is, manages to make you laugh even at the darkest of scenarios.--Diana Arterian "Literary Hub"

Publishing Information

Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Pub date: 2025-10-07
Length: 144 pages

The Allstora Membership

Membership Perks:

  • Save 30% on all online store purchases
  • Exclusive access to author's content
  • You pay less, but authors still earn double

Membership Terms:

First Month: $0.00
Monthly price: $5.00
  • To access membership discount simply log in and add to cart, discount applied automatically.
  • One month free trial, cancel anytime. Membership renews on the 15th of each month.