The Fifth Wound

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.