Beilin’s exhilarating second novel (after Revenge of the Scapegoat) portrays a writer’s struggle to progress with her work after eye surgery. Beilin employs a host of narrative tricks to reflect her unsettled state, including sudden time shifts, a dose of metafiction, and Oulipian constraints such as Cumin’s rewriting of a passage from Shusaku Endo’s novel The Sea and Poison without using any of the letters from the word uterus. 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.

Caren Beilin is one of the most bizarre and fearless writers of her generation.

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

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

Sea, Poison is a deeply weird read – unsettling and funny in turn. The daily frustrations of creative life, the generative power of constraints, the failure of the US healthcare and housing systems, a donkey that somehow resembles Daniel Day-Lewis: it’s all in there.

What a spirited and liberated performance... This novel charmed me from first word to last.

Beilin, wizard that she is, manages to make you laugh even at the darkest of scenarios.

A surreal critique of the medical industry's subterfuge and villainy... Beilin buoys her sea with tongue-in-cheek wit as well as humor.

It’s an extremely funny, incredibly dark novel about Philadelphia, experimental eye surgery, terrible roommates and widespread sexual abuse. Beilin is a genius.