Plague City, Genelle Chaconas's first novel, won the 2019 Kenneth Patchen Award for the Innovative Novel. The book is a William S. Burroughs-style cut-up that reads as much like poetry as fiction. It asks the reader to fill in missing pieces and complete strange "tests," a structure that keeps the reader assembling the text rather than receiving it. The cover is Chaconas's own collage and assembled mixed-media work, and the visual register outside matches the cutting and reassembly going on inside. The 2019 Patchen judge, Jane L. Carman, read it as a collage-style work that asks the reader to return, reread, and reconsider fiction (and reality), prose that sometimes reads like a song, sometimes asks questions, and that shows you how literature might (must!) move forward in a chaotic world.
