The Fifth Wound

The Fifth Wound is a stunningly ambitious work, a blow against the novel as a capitalist project of common intelligibility and a reorientation to a thoroughly queer enterprise. In many ways, Mattia is doing for prose what 김현 (Kim Hyun) has done for poetry, stripping away the trappings of a cisnormat......more

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; ma......more

Such an inventive, silly, smart book that travels through time to deliver a heavily footnoted t4t love note. Your brain will work for it, your brain will be rewarded.......more

Aurora Mattia entranced me with this debut. It ebbs and flows, with moments of opaque writing, and tender scenes with a silky translucent shine. This book takes the traumatic and ecstatic moments of her life, her wounds, her loves, and circles around them in romantic and stylized prose. Her high fem......more

Aurora and Ezekiel, why? The Fifth Wound is not a simple book to talk about, nor is it simple to describe and review. It is a roman à clef of the author, whose true name is not even Aurora, and of her life and experiences as a trans woman, particularly crossing the orbital path of a man she fell in l......more