Published in 2023
259 pages
Aurora Mattia 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.
What is this book about?
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 à 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.
