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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.
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