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A darkly funny, electrifying tale of polyamory, illness, health-care malfeasance, and gynecological crime mixed with Oulipian madness.
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.
"Beilin's exhilarating second novel portrays a writer's struggle to progress with her work after eye surgery...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 review)
"Beilin can be very funny...But the real subject here is human suffering—and in particular the medical mistreatment of women—and the question at the heart of the book is: How do we bear witness to abuse? A madcap, raunchy, unconventional text about medical abuses and literary art, infused with both humor and rage." —Kirkus Reviews
"It's not often I read a work and want to know, simply, how. How did the writer write this?" ―LA Review of Books
This information about Sea, Poison was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Caren Beilin was born in Philadelphia in 1983. She is the author of the novel Revenge of the Scapegoat, which won the Vermont Book Award for Fiction. Her other books are Blackfishing the IUD, Spain, The University of Pennsylvania, and Americans, Guests, or Us. She lives in Cleveland and Philadelphia and teaches at Case Western Reserve University.
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