Sea, Poison (New Directions Publishing)

Caren Beilin is the author of the novel Sea, Poison (New Directions, 2025), longlisted for the 2026 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction. Her novel Revenge of the Scapegoat, 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 where she is Fiction Editor for Cleveland Review of Books and teaches at Case Western Reserve University.

Sea, Poison by Caren Beilin

Cumin Beilin 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 nightmare laser eye surgery. The laser shoots into her brain, making her language spare and her sentences clauseless, 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 the bedroom of polyamorous Maron—who is hooking up with Alix, whom Cumin lusts after. Disheveled from medicines and medical scams, Cumin declares, "The BDE of Alix was getting to me. A coin purse of leopard neck muscles was opening in my underpants!”

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