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The Fifth Wound
Unsex Me Here
Seven Come Eleven
C.V.
Excerpts
New Essay:
“The Prime of Miss Destiny,”
On John Rechy’s City of Night.
Read here.
writer from texas.
currently in queens.
available for editorial work,
teaching opportunities,
readings,
etc.
THE FIFTH WOUND
NIGHTBOAT BOOKS
March 2023
A baroque work of intimate myth exploring one woman’s interdimensional search for beauty and embodiment, through kaleidoscopic renderings of hospital corridors, brutal breakups, and passionate romance.
The Fifth Wound is a phantasmagorical roman à clef about passion as a way of life. In one dimension, this is a love story—Aurora & Ezekiel—a separation and a reunion. In another, we witness a tale of multiple traumatic encounters with transphobic violence. And on yet another plane, a story of ecstatic visionary experience swirls, shatters, and sparkles. Featuring time travel, medieval nuns, knifings, and t4t romance, The Fifth Wound indulges the blur between fantasy and reality. Its winding sentences open like portals, inviting the reader into the intimacy of embodiment—both its pain and its pleasures.
“The Fifth Wound contains some of the most deliriously, convulsively, terrifyingly beautiful writing I’ve ever seen. In the delicate, fleshy membrane of her prose, Mattia holds shards of pain, defiance, erudition, and above all passion – with all the biblical resonances of that word. The book is an astonishment.”
-Barbara Browning
“Reading The Fifth Wound is like being initiated into a gorgeous, femme mystery school. Her prose is simultaneously antique and so, so contemporary; I felt folded into worlds I didn’t want to leave, worlds marked by longing and corporality, magic and power. Hypnotic and bold.”
-Michelle Tea
“In presenting the transfemme as a systematically villainized siren, The Fifth Wound explores what can happen to us when our songs become twisted and warped, or else ignored. With its evocative, mythological imagery and unexpected turns of phrase, Aurora Mattia’s take on the transfeminine confessional is unlike any I’ve read in recent memory.”
-Harron Walker
“Bold, lush, innovative, and extraordinary, Mattia’s work daringly reimagines the very nature of storytelling. I’ve never read anything like The Fifth Wound—and I’ll never forget it.”
-Téa Obreht
“The Fifth Wound is the tender scar of beauty achieved in language. Drawing on rich description, myth, bible stories, autofiction, breathy pillow talk, and breathless confession, it confects a mirror of glamor for the glamor of its author, but which is then delicately rendered onto the page, as a diptych, that the reader might gasp with pleasure. It’s a special kind of transsexual camp, so over the top that what was the top is too far below to see, and we fly free.”-McKenzie Wark
“I have never read anything like Aurora’s writing. I would say less that I have read her work and say more that I have felt it, deep inside my body. It makes my heart ache. It also makes me long for a hard cock down my throat. Her work is a true spiritual experience, in that it causes me lust, grief, anger and ecstasy, sometimes one after the other and sometimes all at once.”
-Carta Monir
“This is a densely embroidered autofictional mythography, a surreal book of hours complete with self-flagellation, a Homeric urban odyssey, ecstatic and violent, tender, devastating, and triumphant, and a hallucinogenic yet visceral medical memoir. Mattia peels layer upon layer, cuts again and again, deep into the wound to spill the life inside.”
-Sarah Gerard
“If Gertrude Stein had a child with Virginia Woolf, they would produce an exquisite comma/semi-colon named Aurora Mattia. In Mattia’s highly magnetic & hyperconscious world of say boudoir shadows, sugarglass, operating tables, transsexuality, auroral wounds, strident malefic forces, a sentence, a paragraph, an entire chapter does bleed; and, it bleeds hyperchromatically, hyperphilosophically, hyperinventively, and hyper-nonbinarily from The Fifth Wound’s “mouth, genitals, genitals, pores, eyes, ass, and nose” into her body’s impeccable sheath.”
-Vi Khi Nao
“This book is transdimensional! Wounds are portals; sentences break open. The narrator has a romance with a Siren; is visited by the spirit of Eleanor Rykener (thought to be the first trans woman in recorded history (ie. a police report)); sustains a knife injury in the face; falls deeply in love; makes meaning, makes myths. Excess is the key here. Maximalist fantasy is a protective gauze and the writing conjures magic of all kinds. A “challenging” read; not for everyone because so intensely and defiantly itself; will be beloved by and formative to many.”
“For all its wild ambition, erudition, and accomplishment, what ultimately makes The Fifth Wound so satisfying to read is simply Mattia’s writing—her way with an image, a sentence, a scene. She can describe anything and make it new.”
“Something that’s been inspiring me more recently is Aurora Mattia’s book The Fifth Wound, which feels almost unclassifiable; it defies your expectations in every conceivable way.”
“Chocked full of winding, brilliant sentences sure to turn readers’ minds inside out, this is a tale of trans love and fantasy that engages with the full scope of the good, the frightening, and the profound.”
“The Fifth Wound dazzles. Its idiosyncratic, genre-hopping prose is so dizzying, its kaleidoscope of cultural references so broad, you might simply come away with the impression of having read an unusual new talent spinning a multidimensional world full of mermaids, saints, and cum.”
-Kawai Shen, The Whitney Review
“To say that Aurora Mattia’s The Fifth Wound is not easily accessible to readers is to do it an injustice—the prose is winding, curving, explosive, and at times, completely unreadable. But that’s the beauty of reading this book: getting lost in its delicious sentences as they turn and burn, coming tosurprising and wonderful conclusions... Mattia has a rhythmic, almost holy way of speaking at times, as if some greater power is speaking through her.”
-Joanna Acevedo, Washington Square Review
UNSEX ME HERE
NIGHTBOAT BOOKS
April 2025
If Aurora Mattia is a switchboard operator, then Unsex Me Here is her call log. Please hold. There’s someone on the other line. A spider, a sibyl, an angel, a mermaid, a goddess, or an ex-girlfriend.
Unsex Me Here is a prayer book tied together by the strings of a corset. Glamorous ramblers, haunted by the sense of another world drawing near, wander in and out of its inexplicable twilight. From a West Texas town with a supernatural past to a stalactite cavern in the birthplace of Aphrodite, from hotel rooms to gardens to the far horizon of a thought, they seek the source of the disturbance in their minds. Heartbreak is not so far from rapture; holy babble is another kind of gossip. Every pilgrimage is as dense with symbolism as it is refined by desire.
“Aurora Mattia writes from the point where passion, pleasure, and fury are transmuted into ecstatic vision. She intervenes into the perennial concerns of trans writing—how to confess without betraying, and how to resist the temptation to simplify experience to something coherent and false. These stories are ruptures in the taut skin of reality, but listen closely and you can hear the implacable, promiscuous mind of a trans woman of our era, trying again and again to break through to the real truth.”
-Emily Zhou
“With a favorite writer, there is a before and an after. Now I have read Aurora Mattia. These stories are so tender and cutting, almost mystical.”
-Amina Cain
“Mattia dazzles with this genre-spanning collection of stories about queer and trans characters navigating desire and love. . . Ripe with poetic metaphor, Mattia’s narratives blend reality, magical realism, and autofiction to create a fever dream of yearning. Readers will be enthralled.”
“Mattia makes the case for a life in pursuit of beauty, pleasure, and belonging above all else. Her characters may writhe in desperation at the burden of such an immense existential undertaking, but their brilliance, their empathy, and their dignity never falter.”
-Alexa Jo Berry, The Poetry Project Newsletter
“Aurora is a brilliant, technical stylist—she writes baroque sentences . . . and evidently knows the laws of grammar well enough to break them, carefully and deliberately.”
-Louis Shankar, The Whitney Review
“Aurora Mattia has finally turned her ravishing technique loose on the prose collection.”
“The book shimmers across boundaries of self and sentence, coalescing into a shifting scent-thetics of post-identity. Like a scent, this poetics is immediate, limbic and limber, evading precise legibility and capture. This is what it is to observe identity’s flickering marks on a world that would like to cage its vapor.”
-Ari Moline, Cleveland Review of Books
“Mattia’s prose is lacquered and psychedelic. Her genius extends from antiquity into every future.”
-Charlie Jones, A Room of One's Own
SEVEN COME ELEVEN
January 2028
Seven Come Eleven follows two trans women, Peach and Pepper, living nearly fifty years apart. Peach works at Soap Creek Saloon as a bartender. Tonight, May 24th, 1977, is her off night. She is at the Saloon pretending to be a man named John Bluebonnet in order to perform her music——because if she sang as Peach, she’d sacrifice her stealth. No one knows Peach is trans. No one knows Peach is John, either. In 2025, Pepper discovers John’s cassette and sets out to find him. But first she needs to find an exit from the maze of her addictions.
CURRICULUM VITAE
Aurora Mattia was born in Hong Kong and raised in Texas, where her mother was born. NIGHTBOAT BOOKS published her first book, THE FIFTH WOUND, in 2023, and her second UNSEX ME HERE, in 2025. Her writing has appeared in BOMB, ZOETROPE: ALL-STORY, JOYLAND and elsewhere, and also in exhibitions at the RISD Museum and the Renaissance Society, accompanying portraits by Elle Pérez. She just finished a new novel called SEVEN COME ELEVEN, forthcoming from Nightboat in January 2028.
INSTAGRAM
NIGHTBOAT
“A Trans Woman’s Shapeshifting Love Story,” with CHRIST, Electric Literature, 2023.
“Writer Aurora Mattia on Telling Your Own Story,” with Lindsey Lerman, The Creative Independent, 2023.
“Aurora Mattia by Madeleine Crum,” BOMB Magazine, 2023.
“Ten Questions for Aurora Mattia,” Poets & Writers, 2023.
“Observer’s Slambook,” with Erin Taylor, Observer, 2022.
“The Revelation of the Seed,” with Jordan Cutler-Tietjen, Yale Literary Magazine, 2020.
Publications:
“The Prime of Miss Destiny,” The Rearview, 2026.
“Star-Crossed,” PICNIC Magazine, 2026.
“I’ve Never Known a Man Who Loved Me,” PICNIC Magazine, 2025.
“Wild and Blue,” BOMB Magazine, 2025.
“Valentine’s Day,” Joyland, 2024.
“RE: What Happened to the Avant-Garde,” The Drift, 2023.
“Via Crucis,” Zoetrope: All-Story, 2020.
“Ezekiel in the Snow,” Prairie Schooner, 2018.
Teaching Experience:
“Body Chronicles,” intensive craft workshop via Pacific University’s MFA (2025): on the creative utility of literary ‘supercuts’—— writing the same scene in the form of a news segment, bar bathroom gossip, a police report, a memoiristic reflection and a prayer, then creating a ‘supercut’ composed only from lines and phrases in the separate pieces, in order to explore the possibilities and limitations of form.
“Traversing Genre,” AWP panel (2026): on how far the rules of fiction can be pushed toward the kaleidoscopic opacity of poetry before it becomes another genre entirely, and the effect of such a disruption on the temporal linearity of grammar.
“Early Modern Trans Sudies 4,” guest lecture at Queens College conference (2026): on the creative possibilities afforded by writing in Middle English, and on the subject of recuperating historical figures, particularly gender non-conforming figures, in contemporary writing and thought——researching buried histories to imagine possible futures.
“Trans Studies at the Commons,” keynote lecture and intensive workshop at University of Kansas (2026): on the subject of automythography, how aspects of magical realism can be integrated into autofiction by trans authors in order to communicate a spiritual reality within and among the unavoidable facts of the everyday.
EXCERPTS
SEVEN COME ELEVEN
The woman turned in his sheets: she did not love the man. He knew she liked to play Waylon on the Wurlitzer, knew she was partial to the sweetness of Gulf Coast oysters and a sharp shot of tequila chased with Shirley Temple, knew she was born in Presidio County but raised in Fort Worth, her uncle a rancher and her father the renter of a ranchstyle house in town, so-called ‘the Pink House’ for its cool primrose blush which was soft as powder at any hour but glowed an almost supernatural shade at twilight, when, in Spring, the whitetailed deer, antlers heaving through the haze of dusk like spirits summoned by the bellowing and reeling of unseen cicadas, would stalk the yard, staring still and silent in a sort of sleepwalking shock, dazed as if by the sight of the dwelling-place, tinted pink from gusts of Mars dust, immaculate despite the passage of eons, of their bygone Creator.
All this the man knew, yet he did not know the name her mother gave her. And for that she could not forgive him. Because if he knew that name——
Well.
So she stood up.
*
The man slept. The sun spread and the earth separated into scenes: the hummingbird sucking nectar from the flutes of pale yellow flowers, the hummingbird flickering and miraging like something that almost exists, untraceable as the frames-per-second of God’s own mind.
Peach did not leave a note. It was enough that she removed her perfume from his nightstand. The room was a mess. The hummingbird was gone and the yellow flowers overhanging the window were shaking.
The man had taught her how to fiddle when she’d imagined she could love him. But she did not own a fiddle of her own, she owned only her way of walking down the darkened hall, jaunty, tits first, wavy chestnut hair catching the breeze as the screen door swung open and she crossed the dry grass to her powderblue Ford truck, started the engine, clicked a cassette into its silver slot and shot off toward whatever life lay ahead, leaving one last ghost hovering wan and expressionless above his dusty drive, halfway to goodbye.
“CELEBRITY SKIN,” from UNSEX ME HERE
But it had all begun among the high rocky cliffs of Avellino, east of Naples, where her parents were born. A backwards old town that’s often remembered, so many times that the memories are worn. Long before she was a sibyl, Hylonome was the youngest child of a Roman bureaucrat, a former imperial advisor who had retired early, following his majesty’s untimely illness (poisoned, they said, by an unnamed priestess of Aphrodite, his former lover, with powdered milk thistle, dissolved into a goblet of wine); her parents’ ‘one and only son.’
Her mother, Clarissa, spent days alone with her loom, within whose warp and weft she encrypted confessions of her extramarital affairs, maps indicating the precise location of the Garden of the Hesperides or the Siren’s summer house, and recollections of the horse (Hylonome, after whom the sibyl later named herself) whose wildness she had not broken but instead surrendered herself to, as if the ambit of the mare’s gallop, canter or parabolic leap——marked by the regular and restive thud of her hooves along a relentless and obliterative circuit of seaside pasture——were exerting a gravitational spell as irresistible as the radiance of a fairy circle, a kind of event horizon, the ultraviolet limit of a covert dimension (nested within the third and fourth) into whose intertemporal void Clarissa’s mind had, one Autumn afternoon of her late adolescence, suddenly and irrevocably vanished, so that she’d seemed to her sisters to experience even the terror of labor as if she were sleepwalking, screaming from a tomb of dreams, lost in a forest of mirrors among whose depthless proliferating forms the mare Hylonome appeared and disappeared, delirious and whinnying, a wound in her side.
Clarissa had loved that horse. She had required no man, had refused one proposal after another, preferring to spend her days walking beside Hylonome in that pasture among the Amalfi cliffs; lying beside her, the mare’s heavy velvet head at rest in her lap; feeding her cubes of sugar and brushing her with perfumed bristles; or, on rare occasions, years into their intimacy, whenever Hylonome gave some secret signal known only to the two of them, riding her bareback across the sand.
But then, one morning, the mare was gone. The emperor Caligula, while touring the provinces, had happened to pass Hylonome’s meadow, and, mesmerized, watching the mare run her relentless circles, gave the signal for his retinue to halt——because, prior to his expedition, the emperor had personally consulted the Sibylline Oracles (those three volumes of prophetic cause-and-effect composed centuries earlier by the very first sibyl of Cumae, sold to or seized by the emperor Tarquinius Superbus but certainly kept since under State lock-and-key in an armored marble crypt) regarding some or other political equation, the solution to which, quoth the sibyl’s scribbles, was to build a circus in the name of Artemis between the Tyrrhenian Sea and Mount Vesuvius, at the heart of a meadow in the land where the wives of the centaurs are buried. So he’d arranged an expedition across Campania——and interpreting her as some demigod descendent of Chiron, elected to protect the secret cemetery——poached the smoky-blue-haunched mare, transporting her to Rome (bucking, whinnying, with a wound in her side) within the slats of a ruby-studded crate, installing her thereafter in the imperial stables and later, infamously, to a seat in the Roman senate, to whose bewildered officers he counterfeited her as a gelded stallion; his next in line; his one and only son. The mare was drugged daily with herbal sedatives. After Caligula’s assassination, she disappears from the historical record.
Clarissa had not witnessed the event itself. She was off collecting strawberries in a piece of cloth
(so she’d later told her daughter Hylonome, by neither utterance nor singsong but flickering holograph transmitted from the mute smoky refractive depths of her infinity eyes, saying nothing, gazing hard not at memory but at some spectral trace element of Hylonome swirling, galloping, undying, within the pearlescent dust storm lustering on the far horizon of her vision),
an old shred of quilt upon which the goddess Aphrodite herself had once, supposedly, left a lipstick trace. Clarissa was off collecting strawberries in a sacred scrap of fabric, to share with her mare on account of the hot summer day. But when she returned, all she saw were the carriages of the imperial retinue trailing off into the hills. And all she heard were wheels and greaves and whinnying. Whinnying like a horse trapped in a burning barn. Then only wheels, and then just dust. Afterward she bore her life as a broken horse bears the saddle.
Though in months and later months she returned to watch the steel squadrons of the empire construct a circus in the meadow, she remained asleep, unwilling or unable to forfeit her nightmare because it was the nearest reality to her lost paradise. She married the man her parents found for her and gave birth to three children and spent her days at her loom or maintaining their home. Clarissa adored her youngest child, doted even——but with a far-off look in her eyes, an awareness, which never entirely receded, of that pearlescent weather on the horizon of time. And Hylonome, though she sensed its resonance, could not interrupt its broadcast. So she sat and watched her mother at the loom.
THE FIFTH WOUND
Call me Aurora, or call me @silicone_angel. But you have to promise not to fall in love with me. If this is a testament, it is not good news: instead of revelation I give reverb.
I am no longer the author of private letters for the eyes of one man who long ago walked along a dry dusty path and out of sight. I can call him one man or I can call him that fairy, who long ago turned his attention to pomegranates and the rustling of doves and away from my howls, extravagant or wuthering or just plain moon and cactus, it didn’t matter to him, to him it was all just the sound of a dream, gauzy and green as if we were twining one another’s ribs with lilacs, incompatible with what he called waking. Really I wanted making phrases to be a way of making love, wanted words to be organic matter as vital and irreducible as cum, wanted dreams to be fluids coaxed and shot forth from the slime of the slick pink glands where our bodies store and distill their harsh and primordial nectars, involuntary honey, every cellar, every nook and alcove empty in its season, bubbling, spilling, easy, breezy, effortless surfeit of wet and unknown folds (that was the dream) but I was only prepared to sing about the beauty of things, not the way beauty was streaked with hate like meat with blood. I mean that I only wrote about butterflies and nameless gods, I wrote the Dream of a Chaste Sleepwalker soon to be woken by the lips of a fey and mysterious prince...but were I telling that particular story again now, I would write, instead, “the dream of a chaste sleepwalker soon to be woken by the lips of a fey and mysterious prince, who all along had been feeding me tiny wafers of colorful crystal at the suggestion of a spindly sylvan mossdraped hag
and/or [ pixelated clone of Artemis
and/or [ edictclutching longdead emissary from Planet Nine, buried alive in her airless glass spacecraft
and/or [ resurrected pterodactyl named Our Lady of the Goodbye, who––according to sources close to that ne’er-do-well cloutchasing nightingale and/or prickly pear with topaz needles and/or oracular honeyscented transsexual nom-de-plumed Fleck of God––wrote the New Testament in a single night, while snorting a powder made from opals through the tube of a rolled orchid petal,” which is to say I once forbade my sentences the very pleasures that hurt so perfectly heartless when I fainted choking on the silhouette of his cock before waking to see it struck suddenly luminous in a glaze of topaz spit as he slipped it softening from my lips and the sun broke over the desert.
(Remember: Darkness separating from darkness. Nameless forms suggesting names. First the high cliffs, gilded; then the masses of cloud and creosote; the thin shine of a stream, the faroff interstate. Here a spine of desert coral, there a bonedry yucca––and bursting from the brambles, the shivering speck of a sparrow. Leading away from camp: your own footsteps in the dust.)