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Sea, Poison
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.
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.
144 pages, Paperback
Published October 7, 2025
25 people are currently reading
1431 people want to read
About the author
Caren Beilin
14 books58 followersCaren Beilin is the author, most recently, of the novel REVENGE OF THE SCAPEGOAT (Dorothy, 2022). She has also written a nonfiction book, BLACKFISHING THE IUD (Wolfman Books, 2019), and a memoir, SPAIN (Rescue Press, 2018). She teaches at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts and lives close by, in Vermont.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 77 reviews
March 24, 2026
Funny, fierce, fiercely political and eerily timely, Caren Beilin’s novella centres Cumin Baleen, a writer battling crises on multiple fronts: chronic illness, a cheating boyfriend, impending homelessness and an inability to string more than the most basic sentence together. But this isn’t yet another sad, bad girl narrative it moves far beyond the standard terrain. Instead, Cumin’s picaresque journey through contemporary Philadelphia aka city of hospitals raises issues around ethics, medical misogyny, capitalism, and othering; teasing out connections to apologists for war and ongoing genocide. All of which coincides with discussions about what fiction could, or should, do. This probably sounds like much too much for such a slender book to tackle. It is. Or at least it should be. Yet, somehow, Beilin pulls it off, partly by steering readers towards sharing the mental load, and partly through inventive engagement with pre-existing texts from Shūsaku Endō’s The Sea and Poison to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Georges Perec’s A Void.
Allusions to Beilin’s life and earlier work are dotted throughout. Cumin herself, who’s somewhere between doppelganger and stand-in, featured in a previous short story. But this isn’t autofiction – a genre Beilin dislikes – so much as the interweaving of aspects of experience from sexual desires to political and intellectual preoccupations. Conrad and Endō open up a fragmented meditation on bystanders to appalling injustice. Cumin’s fascinated by Conrad’s Marlow, onlooker to colonialist genocide in the Congo. Endō’s novel has a more substantial role. His story was inspired by medical experiments carried out at Kyushu Imperial University School of Medicine during WW2 in which American POWs were used for vivisection, none survived. In Endō’s chilling but muted piece, it’s junior doctor Suguro who’s ultimately the bystander, the one who sees poison yet turns away.
Cumin – like Beilin – is living with an autoimmune disease, told she’s at risk of sudden blindness she agrees to laser treatment. But later finds it’s possible she didn’t need surgery and her brain seems to have been affected, maybe even seared by the lasers. Malpractice? Scam? Or part of an elaborate conspiracy to transform Cumin into an Oulipian not by choice but by brain injury? Certainly, it seems as if she’s left wrestling with externally-imposed constraints not unlike Oulipo movement writers. Beilin heads numerous chapters with names taken from the array of drugs Cumin’s been prescribed, highlighting their impact on mind and body. She mingles depictions of medical appointments with references to Cumin’s braless, bouncing breasts – ruthlessly mocking conventions governing how characters – especially women – are constructed via realist novels. A practice that connects to how women are ‘read’ in society, including how they’re positioned by doctors.
Doctors recur across the novel from Helen Dickens who fought against the abuse of Black women by white medical practitioners to men in the news who’ve gotten away with raping or otherwise mistreating patients for years, sometimes decades. Doctors whose staff often knew about their behaviour but elected not to report it. This takes us back to bystanders, as well as highlighting the intense mismatch between cultural perceptions of doctors as trustworthy, empathetic figures and the less palatable reality for many, and for many women – including Beilin’s/Baleen’s mother. Baleen, like Beilin, was born under the shadow of violence compounded by intergenerational trauma stemming from her identity as Jewish and the inescapable fact of the Holocaust. Thoughts about the Holocaust criss-crossed with reflections on Conrad’s Congo – Beilin’s talked about her wish not to frame genocide as a hierarchy.
A series of weird connections lead Cumin to move into a closet owned by a polyamorous acquaintance, from there she meets and pursues a nurse who claims to know all the secrets of the clinic where Cumin’s eyes were treated. It’s a narrative made up of breadcrumbs. Apparent happenstance drives Cumin’s story; random characters appear and disappear – just like Endō’s. And, just like Endō, perspectives abruptly shift. However, seemingly wild chains of association gradually cohere to underline the absurdities and horrors of American society, its money-driven institutions, its outlandish priorities – the trillions spent on the War on Terror, sparked by domestic losses effortlessly outpaced by deaths arising from poverty, social inequality and inadequate healthcare. Characters discuss lifestyles, sexual choices while the world around them is falling apart. Cumin’s ex spends his time wrangling with the herd of cats that dominate his new home. Cumin obsessively cites, works and reworks passages from Endō his portrayal of scripted empathy, of ordinary cruelties that can culminate in cruelty on the grandest of scales, both haunts and inspires. There are hints too of Deleuze's underlying influence. Admittedly there are moments when Beilin falters, even overreaches, but overall, this is an impressive, stimulating piece. Outwardly bizarre and labyrinthine but actually exceptionally disciplined, managing to be both deathly serious and incredibly, playfully entertaining.
Thanks to Netgalley and Scribner UK
Allusions to Beilin’s life and earlier work are dotted throughout. Cumin herself, who’s somewhere between doppelganger and stand-in, featured in a previous short story. But this isn’t autofiction – a genre Beilin dislikes – so much as the interweaving of aspects of experience from sexual desires to political and intellectual preoccupations. Conrad and Endō open up a fragmented meditation on bystanders to appalling injustice. Cumin’s fascinated by Conrad’s Marlow, onlooker to colonialist genocide in the Congo. Endō’s novel has a more substantial role. His story was inspired by medical experiments carried out at Kyushu Imperial University School of Medicine during WW2 in which American POWs were used for vivisection, none survived. In Endō’s chilling but muted piece, it’s junior doctor Suguro who’s ultimately the bystander, the one who sees poison yet turns away.
Cumin – like Beilin – is living with an autoimmune disease, told she’s at risk of sudden blindness she agrees to laser treatment. But later finds it’s possible she didn’t need surgery and her brain seems to have been affected, maybe even seared by the lasers. Malpractice? Scam? Or part of an elaborate conspiracy to transform Cumin into an Oulipian not by choice but by brain injury? Certainly, it seems as if she’s left wrestling with externally-imposed constraints not unlike Oulipo movement writers. Beilin heads numerous chapters with names taken from the array of drugs Cumin’s been prescribed, highlighting their impact on mind and body. She mingles depictions of medical appointments with references to Cumin’s braless, bouncing breasts – ruthlessly mocking conventions governing how characters – especially women – are constructed via realist novels. A practice that connects to how women are ‘read’ in society, including how they’re positioned by doctors.
Doctors recur across the novel from Helen Dickens who fought against the abuse of Black women by white medical practitioners to men in the news who’ve gotten away with raping or otherwise mistreating patients for years, sometimes decades. Doctors whose staff often knew about their behaviour but elected not to report it. This takes us back to bystanders, as well as highlighting the intense mismatch between cultural perceptions of doctors as trustworthy, empathetic figures and the less palatable reality for many, and for many women – including Beilin’s/Baleen’s mother. Baleen, like Beilin, was born under the shadow of violence compounded by intergenerational trauma stemming from her identity as Jewish and the inescapable fact of the Holocaust. Thoughts about the Holocaust criss-crossed with reflections on Conrad’s Congo – Beilin’s talked about her wish not to frame genocide as a hierarchy.
A series of weird connections lead Cumin to move into a closet owned by a polyamorous acquaintance, from there she meets and pursues a nurse who claims to know all the secrets of the clinic where Cumin’s eyes were treated. It’s a narrative made up of breadcrumbs. Apparent happenstance drives Cumin’s story; random characters appear and disappear – just like Endō’s. And, just like Endō, perspectives abruptly shift. However, seemingly wild chains of association gradually cohere to underline the absurdities and horrors of American society, its money-driven institutions, its outlandish priorities – the trillions spent on the War on Terror, sparked by domestic losses effortlessly outpaced by deaths arising from poverty, social inequality and inadequate healthcare. Characters discuss lifestyles, sexual choices while the world around them is falling apart. Cumin’s ex spends his time wrangling with the herd of cats that dominate his new home. Cumin obsessively cites, works and reworks passages from Endō his portrayal of scripted empathy, of ordinary cruelties that can culminate in cruelty on the grandest of scales, both haunts and inspires. There are hints too of Deleuze's underlying influence. Admittedly there are moments when Beilin falters, even overreaches, but overall, this is an impressive, stimulating piece. Outwardly bizarre and labyrinthine but actually exceptionally disciplined, managing to be both deathly serious and incredibly, playfully entertaining.
Thanks to Netgalley and Scribner UK
Read
June 1, 2025Caren, girl, you are wild for this one
March 21, 2026
This is so my shit
November 24, 2025
A wild, smart, and entertaining book centered on medical malpractice in lots of forms. The writing is the star of this show, as Beilin's often bizarre word choices and syntactical decisions make for an untamed reading experience.
March 10, 2026
Longlisted for the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction
I didn't feel any of this as interesting or a coincidence in that moment, though now it surely comes into focus as a big one. But that is because I am organizing a novel now best I can, amidst the rivers and the piles of everyone, and walking only a broken, only an overgrown and burnt road in my mind. It was a major coincidence, or consequential, even the brain-injured can start to realize that, and I feel it that way now, now as I'm writing it, I understand now that I am obviously reporting a major coincidence, that I am writing a novel, which is formally mostly an inventory of coincidences, but at the time you have to understand I was just another Philadelphian, someone who is quite used to meeting people who work at a university or a hospital in different combinatory amalgamations, it's common.
Sea, Poison by Karen Beilin was published in the US in 2025 by New Directions and is forthcoming in 2026 from Simon and Schuster in the UK.
This is a very distinctive, at times rather baffling, novel. The narrator, Cumin Baleen (the pun a nod to her being an authorial stand-in) undergoes a somewhat unnecessary eye surgery, a complication of which causes her writing style to change, and which proves to be the result of a deliberate Medical OuLiPo experiment by a literary theorist whose PhD was on Anne Frank and George Perec:
”JANINE LE MARIN DRAWS A LINE BETWEEN THE WORK of Georges Perec, a famous orphan of the Holocaust, and the diarist Anne Frank, and asks, Is there a bigger constraint - OuLiPo or otherwise - than genocide?”
"Is Anne Frank in fact our signal Oulipian with her infamous limit on paper to write with, on lit writing hours? The constraint of her blithe older sister, Margot, the constraint of keeping constant company with the van Pels?”
Shūsaku Endō’s The Sea and Poison, in Michael Gallacher’s translation provides the novel its title as well as forming a key backbone of the text, indeed the first draft of the novel was “a line for line syntactical mirror of Endo’s novel about human vivisection during World War II” focused on modern-day medical abuse in OB/GYN, including unnecessary hysterectomies and rape, the former epitomised in the career of Javaid Perwaiz - see: https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/doct...
Throw in Carrie Bradshaw, the dispute between Marie NDiaye and Marie Darrieussecq, Heart of Darkness, polyamorous relationships, the Sex Chair genre of movies and much more, and, in such a (welcome) short page count it makes for an intoxicating and sometimes confusing mix, although Beilin’s key point, about medical malfeasance, with women in particular as the victims, still lands strongly.
The nearest comparison (although not that near) in my reading experience is Patrick Cottrell’s brilliant Sorry to Disturb the Peace, and it was interesting to see Cottrell has both interviewed Beilin, and also teaches one of her earlier works, Revenge of the Scapegoat, on his literary course (on a fascinating list alongside Olga Ravn/Martin Aitken’s The Employees, Maria Ndiaye/Jordan Stump’s Vengeance is Mine, Han Kang/Deborah Smith’s Human Acts and Maya Binman’s Hangman).
Provocative, ambitious and very different, although not entirely successful.
Interview in LARB about that earlier work: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/a...
Interview: https://fracturedlit.com/too-sick-too...
Review in Southwest Review: https://southwestreview.com/the-good-...
Thanks to the UK publisher via Netgalley for the ARC
I didn't feel any of this as interesting or a coincidence in that moment, though now it surely comes into focus as a big one. But that is because I am organizing a novel now best I can, amidst the rivers and the piles of everyone, and walking only a broken, only an overgrown and burnt road in my mind. It was a major coincidence, or consequential, even the brain-injured can start to realize that, and I feel it that way now, now as I'm writing it, I understand now that I am obviously reporting a major coincidence, that I am writing a novel, which is formally mostly an inventory of coincidences, but at the time you have to understand I was just another Philadelphian, someone who is quite used to meeting people who work at a university or a hospital in different combinatory amalgamations, it's common.
Sea, Poison by Karen Beilin was published in the US in 2025 by New Directions and is forthcoming in 2026 from Simon and Schuster in the UK.
This is a very distinctive, at times rather baffling, novel. The narrator, Cumin Baleen (the pun a nod to her being an authorial stand-in) undergoes a somewhat unnecessary eye surgery, a complication of which causes her writing style to change, and which proves to be the result of a deliberate Medical OuLiPo experiment by a literary theorist whose PhD was on Anne Frank and George Perec:
”JANINE LE MARIN DRAWS A LINE BETWEEN THE WORK of Georges Perec, a famous orphan of the Holocaust, and the diarist Anne Frank, and asks, Is there a bigger constraint - OuLiPo or otherwise - than genocide?”
"Is Anne Frank in fact our signal Oulipian with her infamous limit on paper to write with, on lit writing hours? The constraint of her blithe older sister, Margot, the constraint of keeping constant company with the van Pels?”
Shūsaku Endō’s The Sea and Poison, in Michael Gallacher’s translation provides the novel its title as well as forming a key backbone of the text, indeed the first draft of the novel was “a line for line syntactical mirror of Endo’s novel about human vivisection during World War II” focused on modern-day medical abuse in OB/GYN, including unnecessary hysterectomies and rape, the former epitomised in the career of Javaid Perwaiz - see: https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/doct...
Throw in Carrie Bradshaw, the dispute between Marie NDiaye and Marie Darrieussecq, Heart of Darkness, polyamorous relationships, the Sex Chair genre of movies and much more, and, in such a (welcome) short page count it makes for an intoxicating and sometimes confusing mix, although Beilin’s key point, about medical malfeasance, with women in particular as the victims, still lands strongly.
The nearest comparison (although not that near) in my reading experience is Patrick Cottrell’s brilliant Sorry to Disturb the Peace, and it was interesting to see Cottrell has both interviewed Beilin, and also teaches one of her earlier works, Revenge of the Scapegoat, on his literary course (on a fascinating list alongside Olga Ravn/Martin Aitken’s The Employees, Maria Ndiaye/Jordan Stump’s Vengeance is Mine, Han Kang/Deborah Smith’s Human Acts and Maya Binman’s Hangman).
Provocative, ambitious and very different, although not entirely successful.
Interview in LARB about that earlier work: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/a...
Interview: https://fracturedlit.com/too-sick-too...
Review in Southwest Review: https://southwestreview.com/the-good-...
Thanks to the UK publisher via Netgalley for the ARC
January 19, 2026
I'm ngl, I struggled with this one. I could appreciate some of the things the author was doing, but it just didn't hold my interest enough. I was laboring to complete this. There were a lot of literary references I enjoyed, but I feel like this was too reliant on having prior knowledge of Shusaku Endo's The Sea and Poison (which I have not read) and of OuLiPo, which I will admit, I'm not familiar with at all. I appreciate smart-witted writing, but not when it excludes the common reader from understanding the purpose of it.
March 22, 2026
Reviewed this wild ride for Southwest Review. Read it here: https://southwestreview.com/the-good-...
March 20, 2026
This felt vaguely like having a stroke the entire time. The authors style is meandering and at times confusing. At points the concepts were interesting- combining literature restraints with medical malpractice. However, the plot never really seems like the focus. It’s almost like a few events that happen to a character, but then that goes nowhere. No fighting back against the system or real conclusion to the story. It felt like more of an ode to an author I’ve never read and a French concept I think is pretentious.
It’s for a very specific reader and that just wasn’t me
It’s for a very specific reader and that just wasn’t me
January 7, 2026
Caren Beilin is positioning herself as this generation’s Pynchon, and I’m surprised nobody has noted what a beautiful ode this is to his maximalist style in minimal pages. The book is replete with song lyrics, film titles (complete with release years), and a deep undercurrent of paranoia regarding the (uniquely “Beilinian” medical) powers that be. Beilin centers playful syntax, running laps around the reader (even omitting the letter “e” for a lipogrammatic chapter with zero fanfare) without dampening her heavy thematic punches. By using intertextual references (including nods to her own oeuvre!) as scaffolding, Beilin has solidified a signature style ripe for a cult following (à la Pynchon) that I’m investing early in - I hope she makes a MILLION BILLION DOLLARS off of it!!!!
October 11, 2025
This was a beautifully unsettling read. It was the kind of book that lingers in the back of your mind and kind of makes your skin itch. Caren's writing is extremely sharp and lyrical, with an intense amount of dread that sucker punches you. This was not a comforting story in the slightest, but an incredibly powerful one. It felt like a reflection of grief, guilt, and survival that feels both intimate and universal.
While I had really enjoyed the chaos of the writing, it was a bit disorienting. It was kind of hard to stay grounded, but the emotional weight deserves all of the praise. After I finished this in one sitting, I felt a storm of emotions ranging from pure rage to extremely raw. This is one that will sit for me for quite some time....
While I had really enjoyed the chaos of the writing, it was a bit disorienting. It was kind of hard to stay grounded, but the emotional weight deserves all of the praise. After I finished this in one sitting, I felt a storm of emotions ranging from pure rage to extremely raw. This is one that will sit for me for quite some time....
March 15, 2026
Wild read!!
February 14, 2026
Really fucking weird. The bizarre tortured middle aged woman strikes again! Really had me until maybe about halfway through. I liked the characters, their detail, the set up. Not as convinced by the plot, or especially the ending
But. Worth a read. I had fun
Sad we didn’t get to know more about Janine. I wanted them to be gay but probably moreso for selfish reasons than in any way that would have actually served the story
But. Worth a read. I had fun
Sad we didn’t get to know more about Janine. I wanted them to be gay but probably moreso for selfish reasons than in any way that would have actually served the story
October 14, 2025
I feel like I just took acid and I think that was somewhat intentional but not sure I gleaned from what I was supposed to.
March 27, 2026
Thank you to Scribner for the proof in exchange for an honest review.
3.75 stars.
We follow Cumin Baleen, a writer who is suffering from an autoimmune disease and undergoes laser eye surgery, which has health consequences. In the midst of navigating this and her personal life, she is writing a book about gynaecological malpractice. As she deals with these various threads she finds herself unravelling.
This was a challenging book to read. Our narrator's thoughts come thick and fast, sometimes with seemingly little rhyme or reason, and the narrative never really settles into a flow, which felt by design. The effect was unsettling and confusing but there was plenty of humour thrown in too. It was an oddly compelling combination.
I feel like this would be a book appreciated by older millennials, with several 90s references such as Alanis Morissette song lyrics and some interesting thoughts on Carrie Bradshaw added to the mix.
This definitely deserves a re-read at some point as I feel I probably didn't fully appreciate it.
3.75 stars.
We follow Cumin Baleen, a writer who is suffering from an autoimmune disease and undergoes laser eye surgery, which has health consequences. In the midst of navigating this and her personal life, she is writing a book about gynaecological malpractice. As she deals with these various threads she finds herself unravelling.
This was a challenging book to read. Our narrator's thoughts come thick and fast, sometimes with seemingly little rhyme or reason, and the narrative never really settles into a flow, which felt by design. The effect was unsettling and confusing but there was plenty of humour thrown in too. It was an oddly compelling combination.
I feel like this would be a book appreciated by older millennials, with several 90s references such as Alanis Morissette song lyrics and some interesting thoughts on Carrie Bradshaw added to the mix.
This definitely deserves a re-read at some point as I feel I probably didn't fully appreciate it.
March 17, 2026
Possibly the strangest thing I’ve ever read, and I’ve read some strange things. Moments of brilliance, and many moments where I felt confused and repulsed. Literary theorists and surrealism/ absurdism fans may enjoy this.
Littered with references to other literature the novel does read somewhat as a literary in joke, Heart of Darkness, The Sean and Poison by Endo which the novel echoes and shifts, and references to the OuLiPo movement (mathematicians writing novels based on particular restrictions, like Perec removing an E, or structuring novels as palindromes) with a tongue in cheekiness.
I also enjoyed references to key 90s and 2000s cultural touch points - broke back mountain, the exorcist - and underground theatre in Philadelphia basements.
Underneath the lyrical and linguistic acrobatics is a story that reveals the horror of medical crime committed against women, from unnecessary hysterectomies motivated by insurance fraud to sexual assault and rape in gynecologic settings. At the end, she begins writing without the letters “u, t, e, r, u, s.”
Ultimately I found the writing, while inventive and impressive, ultimately obtrusive to my understanding, which was likely her point. I think I enjoyed theorising about it more than I did reading it.
Littered with references to other literature the novel does read somewhat as a literary in joke, Heart of Darkness, The Sean and Poison by Endo which the novel echoes and shifts, and references to the OuLiPo movement (mathematicians writing novels based on particular restrictions, like Perec removing an E, or structuring novels as palindromes) with a tongue in cheekiness.
I also enjoyed references to key 90s and 2000s cultural touch points - broke back mountain, the exorcist - and underground theatre in Philadelphia basements.
Underneath the lyrical and linguistic acrobatics is a story that reveals the horror of medical crime committed against women, from unnecessary hysterectomies motivated by insurance fraud to sexual assault and rape in gynecologic settings. At the end, she begins writing without the letters “u, t, e, r, u, s.”
Ultimately I found the writing, while inventive and impressive, ultimately obtrusive to my understanding, which was likely her point. I think I enjoyed theorising about it more than I did reading it.
January 23, 2026
A bum steer for me, from whom I cannot recall.
I will take on challenging books, but in the hope that they have some reward therein. There’s a lot going on in not many pages, but that absolutely doesn’t make for a quick read. Beilin takes on themes of elective surgery, Japanese literature, copying work, writer’s block and polyamory.. and there’s probably more.. but all too much for me. I must admit to being perplexed by much of it.
I will take on challenging books, but in the hope that they have some reward therein. There’s a lot going on in not many pages, but that absolutely doesn’t make for a quick read. Beilin takes on themes of elective surgery, Japanese literature, copying work, writer’s block and polyamory.. and there’s probably more.. but all too much for me. I must admit to being perplexed by much of it.
November 9, 2025
This evokes a similar uncanny feeling as Sophie Kemp and Jen George, and although I didn’t like this as much as either, I still admired it tremendously. The illusionary chaos of its style and composition, it’s not really like anything else. In its best moments, I felt like I was reading at the disorientating edge of contemporary American literature. These moments happen fairly frequently and it’s like you’re watching the necessities of the form be rewired. There’s some truly bizarre stuff in here. Sharp, weird writing that is absurd, poetic, and fearless in precise and equal measure. It’s best when it stays light on its feet, moving deftly between its strangenesses, carrying its reoccurring motifs between them. There are chapters that are less successful, especially ones that intentionally break from the rapid-fire jagged constructions and oblique style, that suddenly veer into something more sustained and explanatory at the cost of some poignancy.
July 6, 2025
Deranged (complimentary) and every single trigger warning. Difficult and probably a little hard to hand sell but I’m gonna try.
March 2, 2026
Actual rating: 1.5/5
"Were these bachelors in a cult, or a group secretly traveling together, was this organized or does life sometime organize who dies, almost as a bowerbird will organise trash it finds by color, why were seven bachelors lined up alone in their beds and dead there?"
Sea, Poison was kindly provided to me by the Scribner content creator programme.
This short book follows a woman who is subject to a medical scam that takes advantage of her recently diagnosed autoimmune disease and constant fight with finding the right medication to convince her to have a surgery that she definitely does not need.
Beilin's writing style is interesting but so difficult to follow. I struggled at the beginning of the book to really get into it and had to reread quite a few sentences to understand what was going on within the chapters. I did think that the topics within this little book were interesting, such as medical malpractice, human experiments, polygamy and exploration. But this one just didn't work too well for me. I didn't understand the random chapters from Matt's point of view and I felt like this book was way too scattered. I can understand the decision to make it like this because of the link to Cumin's brain and thought process (this book very much feels like a string of thoughts), but it was so overwhelming in parts. There is so much packed into the pages and I was still left a bit confused by the end of it.
I would strongly suggest that anyone interested in this book consults the trigger warnings before picking it up. (TW content spoilers)
A curious book that had interesting prose, but way too confusing for me to find it enjoyable. 💊
"Were these bachelors in a cult, or a group secretly traveling together, was this organized or does life sometime organize who dies, almost as a bowerbird will organise trash it finds by color, why were seven bachelors lined up alone in their beds and dead there?"
Sea, Poison was kindly provided to me by the Scribner content creator programme.
This short book follows a woman who is subject to a medical scam that takes advantage of her recently diagnosed autoimmune disease and constant fight with finding the right medication to convince her to have a surgery that she definitely does not need.
Beilin's writing style is interesting but so difficult to follow. I struggled at the beginning of the book to really get into it and had to reread quite a few sentences to understand what was going on within the chapters. I did think that the topics within this little book were interesting, such as medical malpractice, human experiments, polygamy and exploration. But this one just didn't work too well for me. I didn't understand the random chapters from Matt's point of view and I felt like this book was way too scattered. I can understand the decision to make it like this because of the link to Cumin's brain and thought process (this book very much feels like a string of thoughts), but it was so overwhelming in parts. There is so much packed into the pages and I was still left a bit confused by the end of it.
I would strongly suggest that anyone interested in this book consults the trigger warnings before picking it up. (TW content spoilers)
A curious book that had interesting prose, but way too confusing for me to find it enjoyable. 💊
April 11, 2026
A wild read from stat to finish which is grounded in very real life experiences that many women face. It made me uncomfortable and reflective which is the point. The book is written in short, almost essay style chapters that follow our main character and her struggles with her brain injury (or writers block), eye surgery and research into gynaecological abuse.
I struggled a little with the format in the beginning and when I returned after a day or so and I think on a reread I would try to read in one go as I feel it would flow that way. Excellently written and impactful.
Thank you scribner uk for the prof copy!
I struggled a little with the format in the beginning and when I returned after a day or so and I think on a reread I would try to read in one go as I feel it would flow that way. Excellently written and impactful.
Thank you scribner uk for the prof copy!
December 29, 2025
This was my strangest and most unique read all year. I still need to time to fully process it. I lost my grip on the narrative at times, but eventually get re-oriented. This story was a funny, absurd, and horrifying journey. Will def be reading again!
February 4, 2026
Absurd in the best way, and deeply relatable to anyone who has navigated the slippery membranes between a sick body and the rest of the world. I haven't had such a good reason to cackle on the subway like a lunatic in a long time.
March 31, 2026
Thank you so much for the proof!!
3.25?? or 3.5??
I've read two books at the same time that were giving the same vibes 🤣
this was interesting but also really weird. very dark at parts with some of the discussions which, to me, surprised tf outta me.
3.25?? or 3.5??
I've read two books at the same time that were giving the same vibes 🤣
this was interesting but also really weird. very dark at parts with some of the discussions which, to me, surprised tf outta me.
Read
October 7, 2025I treasure Caren Beilin and her big big sentences
January 8, 2026
I was confused the whole time and I still don’t understand it after googling
March 6, 2026
Thankyou Scribner books for sending me a proof copy of this book.
Its a very weird and disorientating story. The MC Cumin gets laser eye surgery that she is told she needs or she risks permanent blindness. As a result she ends up with brain damage that changes the way she writes. Cumin is a writer who is writing a book around OBGYN Medical malpractice and living with her polyamorous friend.
I enjoyed how after her brain injury the writing changed and how the Author Caren Beilin played around with the writing style. For me everything got very disjointed and confusing and whilst i did understand the idea around it, it did affect my enjoyment in reading it where i couldnt decide if i loved it or hated it.
I think the story aspects itself especially with regards to not believing women and this idea that Dr's know best and say the Hippocratic Oath and then knowingly then cause harm is an aspect that needs to be discussed more within the media to be like this is not normal.
Overall, it was a very interesting and quirky book with topics that need more attention, however it was just a bit to disjointed for me to fully connect.
Its a very weird and disorientating story. The MC Cumin gets laser eye surgery that she is told she needs or she risks permanent blindness. As a result she ends up with brain damage that changes the way she writes. Cumin is a writer who is writing a book around OBGYN Medical malpractice and living with her polyamorous friend.
I enjoyed how after her brain injury the writing changed and how the Author Caren Beilin played around with the writing style. For me everything got very disjointed and confusing and whilst i did understand the idea around it, it did affect my enjoyment in reading it where i couldnt decide if i loved it or hated it.
I think the story aspects itself especially with regards to not believing women and this idea that Dr's know best and say the Hippocratic Oath and then knowingly then cause harm is an aspect that needs to be discussed more within the media to be like this is not normal.
Overall, it was a very interesting and quirky book with topics that need more attention, however it was just a bit to disjointed for me to fully connect.
April 30, 2026
Unfortunately have no idea what happened in this book despite my best efforts. Thank you to the publisher for my copy tho!
Love that there’s lots of great reviews for this one, it just wasn’t for me!
Love that there’s lots of great reviews for this one, it just wasn’t for me!
February 27, 2026
This book is deeply subversive, prone to dramatic shifts in prose and not for those who want a traditional story.
Exploring the devastating consequences of medical malpractice, of prescriptions with serious side effects against a backdrop of a woman who is floating, struggling and with constant references to cultural cornerstones. This is a one sitting book that you must immerse yourself in.
The prose shifts constantly and often slides in an almost stream of consciousness. As Cumin, the lead, slowly loses her grip on life, the prose loses a grip on being grounded in reality, clever.
Exploring the devastating consequences of medical malpractice, of prescriptions with serious side effects against a backdrop of a woman who is floating, struggling and with constant references to cultural cornerstones. This is a one sitting book that you must immerse yourself in.
The prose shifts constantly and often slides in an almost stream of consciousness. As Cumin, the lead, slowly loses her grip on life, the prose loses a grip on being grounded in reality, clever.
April 22, 2026
copy & pasted from my MFA annotation on this book:
There are about a million different “meta-fictional” aspects to Sea, Poison, but I want to talk, specifically, about her chapter, A Manager (77 - 97), which is (mostly) presented as “an MFA thesis reading for one person, a young man… Matt” (75, 79). For some reason, self-insert is considered a cop-out in most literary spaces I’ve been in. I am working on the question of why here, I suppose. Why is it so bad to simply state one’s opinions as one’s own in a story? Why must there be some kind of ‘device’ that arbitrates, or negotiates, between authorial artifice & speaker authenticity? Can it—telling a story by relaying its presentation to the speaker—be done successfully? If so, how? Here, Beilin explicitly tells another character’s story with the understanding that it is being relayed to us, rather than happening in the moment.
Although it’s not initially clear, it is understood that the story is being delivered directly from the mouth of Matt, & not as a replay of Cumin’s receiving it, which is indicated in the final line of the ending of the previous chapter, when a mic is set up & Cumin is thwarted from escaping the reading, “& just like that, it was too late” (75). The opening passage in A Manager confused me, as does much of the rest of this novel, because I did not know who was speaking at first. There’s the familiar “I” / “me” character that’s been with us all along. I thought we were still in Cumin’s perspective, because we had not (as of yet) strayed from her POV, & also, given this chapter comes about ¾ of the way into the book, I assumed all of the ‘major players’ had been accounted for, & the voice, Cumin’s, had been aggregated & solidified, given the amount of time we’d already spent hearing it. The jump in time/place, back to 2000, Ocean City High School, also didn’t throw me, or clue me into the fact that someone else, Matt, was speaking, because we had not (as of yet) heard really anything about the narrator’s upbringing, so the travelling backward made sense as well, that we would get some kind of glimpse into Cumin’s “backstory.” But, no, this section really is the thesis of a creative writing grad student, despite Matt not appearing again in the rest of the novel, nor being previously mentioned.
Within, there are section breaks early on that dip back into Cumin’s perspective, the shift visually noted by a blank line on the page: “I turned to my tablemate,” “‘Everyone,’ this young teacher… said” ; “Don’t be naive about Endo, Cumin… The MFA student continued ” (78 - 79, 80). But then, on page 82, the last section break where it would make sense for Cumin to be talking (since we’ve been firmly planted in Matt’s high-school punk world), Beilin switches, or mixes/mingles (fuses/stitches?), the two speakers into a plausible ‘one,’ in the same way Virginia Woolf does in “Mrs. Dalloway” with the airplane in the sky, & the meeting of the in-book characters with the book-within-the-book characters of Luiselli’s, “Lost Children Archive.” She achieves this effect in a pretty simple technical maneuver, by having the section break before the quoting of the Jeff Ott song (“White-collar conservative businessman… / I’m gonna wave my freak flag HIGH”) be from the perspective of Matt, who is “contin[uing]” his reading, talking about his friend Soren, whose “cut smile seemed to be telling me just this,” which she then follows with the section of ambiguously-experienced somatic feeling: “blood… blushing… a gush of ocean wind,” (80, 82). Finally, this is followed up by another song quote (a continuation of the Ott verse), “That saved a wretch like me!” (83).
That’s the simple technique she uses to pivot between Matt & Cumin, but the texturing—the layering; the stuff that makes this work/gel—comes from the constant inundation of, & interplay between, outside texts: Cumin listening to “the MFA graduate… lift[ing]... from Endo…a late section in The Sea and Poison: ‘An Intern’” which, in the former instance is the namesake from which the book itself derives & is a recurring motif throughout, &, in the latter, which is the namesake for the chapter: “a kind of syntactical mirroring” (79). Then Matt reads on, presenting the band Fifteen (of which Jeff Ott was the leading vocalist) & their significance to the narrator’s youth, whose lyrics “Ott had taken almost verbatim from Hendrix” (82). The lyrics are quoted, blurring personal intimacy between the reader & speaker out of the frame as it switches to a depersonalized ‘floating’ (so to speak) voice, that of Jeff Ott, who is neither on screen, nor present as a figure within the text.
Then Beilin does it again on the next page, but instead of the lyrics being anchored in a cafe setting from the perspective of Cumin, Soren—Matt’s friend—is reintroduced immediately in the text, “Then he was with the recruitment officers” (83). The anchor, there, between the significance of the Jeff Ott lyrics, “I refuse to believe God created me / To be abused,” & the continuation of the Matt’s thesis, is him getting Jeff Ott’s initials tattooed on the top of his feet with Soren, & “feel[ing] the pull of the rusting wire that connects my chest to each foot, and binds my feet in a pact of purpose, and I still hear the music from that Fifteen album” (83).
Beilin pulls on this thread again, when Matt does some introspection about Soren’s deployment to the Middle East in the wake of 9/11, in which his (Soren’s) father had been killed, & how “it occurred to [him] that J & O, the initials on [Soren’s] feet, were also the initials of his killed father, Joseph Oeda, so he’d tricked me, he’d had a backup or forefront meaning that was nothing to do with me” (85). This usage of lyrics & outside text then allows for Beilin to seamlessly continue in Matt’s voice for the rest of the chapter, when he quotes from other artists later on: Ohia’s Didn’t It Rain, Alanis Morissette’s You Oughta Know, Peter Gabriel, & Magnolia Electric Co. (another of Jason Molina’s bands) (86, 92, 94 - 95). Thus, though Caren Beilin/Cumin Baleen state, “This [Sea, Poison] cannot be… a frame narrative,” given the lack a typical “narrative” arc, it still has framing elements, such as (in smaller cases) song lyrics from musicians of particularly important personal significance, as well as the quoted passages from Shusaku Endo’s “The Sea and Poison,” or, in the most significant/extended case, as I presented here, in an entire chapter, A Manager (98).
There are about a million different “meta-fictional” aspects to Sea, Poison, but I want to talk, specifically, about her chapter, A Manager (77 - 97), which is (mostly) presented as “an MFA thesis reading for one person, a young man… Matt” (75, 79). For some reason, self-insert is considered a cop-out in most literary spaces I’ve been in. I am working on the question of why here, I suppose. Why is it so bad to simply state one’s opinions as one’s own in a story? Why must there be some kind of ‘device’ that arbitrates, or negotiates, between authorial artifice & speaker authenticity? Can it—telling a story by relaying its presentation to the speaker—be done successfully? If so, how? Here, Beilin explicitly tells another character’s story with the understanding that it is being relayed to us, rather than happening in the moment.
Although it’s not initially clear, it is understood that the story is being delivered directly from the mouth of Matt, & not as a replay of Cumin’s receiving it, which is indicated in the final line of the ending of the previous chapter, when a mic is set up & Cumin is thwarted from escaping the reading, “& just like that, it was too late” (75). The opening passage in A Manager confused me, as does much of the rest of this novel, because I did not know who was speaking at first. There’s the familiar “I” / “me” character that’s been with us all along. I thought we were still in Cumin’s perspective, because we had not (as of yet) strayed from her POV, & also, given this chapter comes about ¾ of the way into the book, I assumed all of the ‘major players’ had been accounted for, & the voice, Cumin’s, had been aggregated & solidified, given the amount of time we’d already spent hearing it. The jump in time/place, back to 2000, Ocean City High School, also didn’t throw me, or clue me into the fact that someone else, Matt, was speaking, because we had not (as of yet) heard really anything about the narrator’s upbringing, so the travelling backward made sense as well, that we would get some kind of glimpse into Cumin’s “backstory.” But, no, this section really is the thesis of a creative writing grad student, despite Matt not appearing again in the rest of the novel, nor being previously mentioned.
Within, there are section breaks early on that dip back into Cumin’s perspective, the shift visually noted by a blank line on the page: “I turned to my tablemate,” “‘Everyone,’ this young teacher… said” ; “Don’t be naive about Endo, Cumin… The MFA student continued ” (78 - 79, 80). But then, on page 82, the last section break where it would make sense for Cumin to be talking (since we’ve been firmly planted in Matt’s high-school punk world), Beilin switches, or mixes/mingles (fuses/stitches?), the two speakers into a plausible ‘one,’ in the same way Virginia Woolf does in “Mrs. Dalloway” with the airplane in the sky, & the meeting of the in-book characters with the book-within-the-book characters of Luiselli’s, “Lost Children Archive.” She achieves this effect in a pretty simple technical maneuver, by having the section break before the quoting of the Jeff Ott song (“White-collar conservative businessman… / I’m gonna wave my freak flag HIGH”) be from the perspective of Matt, who is “contin[uing]” his reading, talking about his friend Soren, whose “cut smile seemed to be telling me just this,” which she then follows with the section of ambiguously-experienced somatic feeling: “blood… blushing… a gush of ocean wind,” (80, 82). Finally, this is followed up by another song quote (a continuation of the Ott verse), “That saved a wretch like me!” (83).
That’s the simple technique she uses to pivot between Matt & Cumin, but the texturing—the layering; the stuff that makes this work/gel—comes from the constant inundation of, & interplay between, outside texts: Cumin listening to “the MFA graduate… lift[ing]... from Endo…a late section in The Sea and Poison: ‘An Intern’” which, in the former instance is the namesake from which the book itself derives & is a recurring motif throughout, &, in the latter, which is the namesake for the chapter: “a kind of syntactical mirroring” (79). Then Matt reads on, presenting the band Fifteen (of which Jeff Ott was the leading vocalist) & their significance to the narrator’s youth, whose lyrics “Ott had taken almost verbatim from Hendrix” (82). The lyrics are quoted, blurring personal intimacy between the reader & speaker out of the frame as it switches to a depersonalized ‘floating’ (so to speak) voice, that of Jeff Ott, who is neither on screen, nor present as a figure within the text.
Then Beilin does it again on the next page, but instead of the lyrics being anchored in a cafe setting from the perspective of Cumin, Soren—Matt’s friend—is reintroduced immediately in the text, “Then he was with the recruitment officers” (83). The anchor, there, between the significance of the Jeff Ott lyrics, “I refuse to believe God created me / To be abused,” & the continuation of the Matt’s thesis, is him getting Jeff Ott’s initials tattooed on the top of his feet with Soren, & “feel[ing] the pull of the rusting wire that connects my chest to each foot, and binds my feet in a pact of purpose, and I still hear the music from that Fifteen album” (83).
Beilin pulls on this thread again, when Matt does some introspection about Soren’s deployment to the Middle East in the wake of 9/11, in which his (Soren’s) father had been killed, & how “it occurred to [him] that J & O, the initials on [Soren’s] feet, were also the initials of his killed father, Joseph Oeda, so he’d tricked me, he’d had a backup or forefront meaning that was nothing to do with me” (85). This usage of lyrics & outside text then allows for Beilin to seamlessly continue in Matt’s voice for the rest of the chapter, when he quotes from other artists later on: Ohia’s Didn’t It Rain, Alanis Morissette’s You Oughta Know, Peter Gabriel, & Magnolia Electric Co. (another of Jason Molina’s bands) (86, 92, 94 - 95). Thus, though Caren Beilin/Cumin Baleen state, “This [Sea, Poison] cannot be… a frame narrative,” given the lack a typical “narrative” arc, it still has framing elements, such as (in smaller cases) song lyrics from musicians of particularly important personal significance, as well as the quoted passages from Shusaku Endo’s “The Sea and Poison,” or, in the most significant/extended case, as I presented here, in an entire chapter, A Manager (98).
January 26, 2026
Sea, Poison follows Cumin Baleen, a forty-one-year-old writer in Philadelphia struggling with illness, relationships, and a stalled project about medical malpractice after a laser eye procedure alters her brain and her writing style. Along the way the novel tangles personal upheaval with sharp, often surreal explorations of the for-profit medical system and nods to Oulipo constraints and Shūsaku Endō’s The Sea and Poison (the title it references). 
There were flashes of brilliance here — some wonderfully strange imagery and moments where the prose genuinely startled in a good way. But overall it felt too disjointed and fractured, and I found myself having to work far too hard to keep track of what was going on. I’m not averse to books that demand effort from the reader, but there’s a threshold beyond which engagement turns into slog, and for me this sat squarely on the wrong side of that line.
Positively, I’d never heard of Endō’s The Sea and Poison before this, and finishing Beilin’s book prompted me to download Endō’s novel to see what it’s like — so there was that takeaway. But despite that and the occasional rewarding sentence, the whole was more perplexing than satisfying for me.
Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC
There were flashes of brilliance here — some wonderfully strange imagery and moments where the prose genuinely startled in a good way. But overall it felt too disjointed and fractured, and I found myself having to work far too hard to keep track of what was going on. I’m not averse to books that demand effort from the reader, but there’s a threshold beyond which engagement turns into slog, and for me this sat squarely on the wrong side of that line.
Positively, I’d never heard of Endō’s The Sea and Poison before this, and finishing Beilin’s book prompted me to download Endō’s novel to see what it’s like — so there was that takeaway. But despite that and the occasional rewarding sentence, the whole was more perplexing than satisfying for me.
Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC
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