Sea, Poison

A darkly funny, electrifying tale of polyamory, medical malfeasance and Carrie Bradshaw, written with utterly singular flair and style.

Cumin Baleen is a forty-one-year-old writer living in Philadelphia – a city of hospitals – who works at the upscale market Sea & Poison, and is navigating the onset of an autoimmune condition. To start a course of medicine that might help, an eye exam is required, which 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 this for-profit medical industry, 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. Dishevelled from medicines and medical scams, unmoored from the reality she once knew, she begins to crack – in more ways than she can imagine…

‘Exhilarating… this rewarding and uncompromising novel is distinguished by its deliriously wild writing. It’s impossible not to be swept up in Beilin’s wake.’ Publisher’s Weekly (starred)

‘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

‘An absurdist masterpiece. Nothing, just nothing, is as wild, outrageous and free as Sea, Poison’ Amina Cain