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…
