Unsex Me Here

For a lot of trans women, the aesthetic is a life-or-death matter, and in more ways than one. Her sentences are crammed with clauses, her clauses with glittering, gleaming objects, her objects adorned with modifiers, her modifiers with yet more modifiers.

Aurora Mattia’s second novel, Unsex Me Here, named for the infamously ravenous line from Lady Macbeth, reads like a spellbook of surrealist transsexual musings.

Mattia’s prose is lacquered and psychedelic. Her genius extends from antiquity into every future.

Exquisite, sensual, and contemplative, this anthology focuses on trans-feminine stories and experiences while rebelling against conventions. It twists together elements of a memoir and mythology to dig into a deeper truth. Readers will be swept away in the current of this captivating novel.

I loved Aurora Mattia’s debut, The Fifth Wound, and her sophomore attempt is just as cutting and kaleidoscopic as her first. Filled with trans love and desire, this collection of stories spans time, metaphor and genre to make for an entrancing read.

This story collection sounds ethereal and haunted, blending realism, the speculative, and autofiction for a true genre-bending experience.

Aurora Mattia has finally turned her ravishing technique loose on the prose collection.

[Unsex Me Here] will dazzle readers . . . a mystical, ethereal, and often emotional ride.

Mattia’s sentences expand and expand, with entirely new thoughts or memories opening up where one might expect a comma or period. . . prismatic.

One of the most intimate books I have ever read. Psychedelic and glittering with raw, tender emotion . . . Unsex Me Here connects the stories of transfeminine individuals across all of time and space. Reading this book is like experiencing the rapture from every angle.

Mattia weaves together a new queer mythology that challenges form, spirituality, and the entire category of fiction. . . I nearly turned around and read the whole thing again.

“Mattia’s prose is nothing short of wondrous — she polishes entirely mundane actions into gems. Her sentences are often baroquely adorned, and this makes for a sensory rich reading experience. Reading Mattia feels like eating a pomegranate from an underworld ruled not by Hades but by Persephone.”

“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.”