Caren Bellin's Sea, Poison
Editorial: "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 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. [...] 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.
