Overview

Named a must read book of 2023 by Nylon, BookRiot,Vulture, The Millions, and Ms. Magazine! 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 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.

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9781643621487

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Reviews

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. -Isle McElroy, Vulture 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 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 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 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 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 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. -Tea Obreht 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 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

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 I don't know where to place Aurora Mattia in Brooklyn. We met at Bossa-we really met before that on Twitter. She told me when we were last together that she had reworked her book around the voice she's developed on Twitter and OnlyFans. I like how contemporary that feels, even though there are delightful baroque twists in her book The Fifth Wound. -McKenzie Wark, Document Journal

Aurora cut, remade, embossed, and embellished the transcript--invested it with the urgent, erudite gusto that courses through all of their stories. What they've made could change so much about so much of the way you see. --Yale Lit Mag Your work astonishes at all levels -- diction, paragraph, structural subdivision -- but your sentences are particularly miraculous. --Interview with Yale Lit Mag

Author Information

Aurora is drawn to dim lights, velvet eyelashes, kaleidoscopes, semicolons, silk draping, cemeteries, and the blank page. She falls into mutual deep infatuation with relative speed because she dives straight to the heart of matters in intimate conversations. Her influences range from the Psalms to the psych ward. She loves Lucinda Williams, Li Bai, Townes van Zandt, the Tarot, Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, Woolf, Glissant and Bluebonnets. She thinks about Texas every day. She lives in Brooklyn.

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