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The Fifth Wound
Unsex Me Here
Seven Come Eleven
C.V.
Excerpts
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