The Fifth Wound

Reviews / Votes

"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


"Aurora, a trans writer trying to get her work published, narrates this dreamlike novel in which she reflects on past memories of love and violence and yearns for her love, Ezekiel." -New York Times


"Through a combination of memoir, mythology, criticism, and fantasy, Mattia attempts to capture the most ephemeral realities and absolute truths about life and love, transition and femininity through peaks of pain and pleasure-not by looking at the horizon beyond these passing sensations, but by traveling through them like a prism, using the transitional power of language to crystallize and shatter life's most intimate moments."-Christ, Electric Literature

"Transcending the limiting confines of not just society, but reality as well, Mattia's novel promises the reader an experience that recalibrates simplistic notions of truth and fiction, reality and illusion."-ES, The Millions

"Aurora Mattia's cosmic, intimate collection of coming of age trans love and fantasy tells different stories of time travel, transphobia and knifings, and T4T romance."-Sophia June, NYLON

"A speculative trans roman a clef about an interdimensional search for love, agency, and freedom from violence for trans people."-Liberty Hardy, BOOK RIOT

"Through a series of ranging lamentations, she reconciles fantasies of her own making or borrowed from other historical and contemporary lenses-with the often violently asserted limits she's encountered in her own life." -Madeleine Crum, BOMB


"Mattia flouts genre conventions with a fierce debut about love, trauma, and the publishing industry's gatekeepers."-Publishers Weekly


"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

"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; makes meaning, makes myths. Excess is the key here. Maximalist fantasy is a protective gauze and the writing conjures magic of all kinds. A "challenging" read; not for everyone because so intensely and defiantly itself; will be beloved by and formative to many."-Megan Milks, Goodreads


"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


"But it's almost impossible not to fall in love with Aurora, whose observations about the world come fast and furious."-Joanna Acevedo, Washington Square Review


"The Fifth Wound, Aurora Mattia's debut novel, is a book that defies categorization and convention: it's memoir, poetry, fantasy, myth, lyric, epistolary, and so much more. It's the story of Aurora, a trans woman living in Brooklyn, and her doomed romance with Ezekiel. While the book does spend time pulling at trauma and transphobic violence, there's also humor to be found in the absurd - nuns and mermaids, fairies and erotic text messages - and Mattia's writing is always sharp and beautiful. In the transfixing The Fifth Wound, the glut of story and form is the point."-Kelsey F., Powells


"a hymnal for fairies in love, girlprophets, collectors and hermits. Aurora Mattia has created a new world of language and insisted upon its arrival. I want to run my fingers across every word."-Lou Barcott, Third Place Books


"A profound confessional. There's an immediate, deep connection between writer and reader that makes this one of the most heart wrenching, visceral experiences. Aurora is pure magic."-Audrey Kohler, Book Woman


"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 femininity and appropriation of a mythic self hit my heart. Mattia did what few could ever do when writing The Fifth Wound, I really loved reading this book."-Iris, Room of One's Own