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)`No-one is doing it like Caren Beilin' Daisy Lafarge`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