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To call Aurora Mattia’s debut book The Fifth Wound a trans narrative feels almost reductive in its taxonomical simplicity. Certainly, a transfemme experience is central to the book’s swelling motifs of embodiment, love, and myth. But The Fifth Wound is, above all else, a book that resists categorization. At the risk of sounding corny, the word trans is best used to describe the work in its prefix form – as transgressive, transformative, transhistorical. 

What is a wound? Mattia gives us several definitions to work with, and these definitions are also prefigured as lenses through which to view the narrative therein. A wound can be literal or figurative, though in the world of Mattia’s text, the distinction between the two frames tends to dissipate. A wound can be a temporal break, self-harm, a breakup, a knife to the skull. Surgery is a wound, but so is the act of revising a sentence. As Mattia puts it in one of her artfully constructed sentences, “a wound is a mouth without a tongue.” 

The Fifth Wound is unlike anything you’ve ever read before. At its core, it is a romance between two lovers, Aurora and Ezekiel. Though their love story is grounded in our world, their existence feels unmoored from the standard fixtures of time and space. The emotions that spill forth from the book are heavy and overflowing, and Mattia doesn’t stick to a single genre, or even a single train of thought, to tell her story. The book combines biography with history and fantasy; what emerges is a text that defies categorization, or at the very least requires a portmanteau. The closest we can get to a succinct descriptor of the book’s form is perhaps a biomythography, a term Audre Lorde used to define her groundbreaking work Zami: A New Spelling Of My Name. 

It’s not just the generic components that resist categorization, it’s also the form the writing takes. There are sentences that last an entire paragraph, and parentheticals that take up much of the page. The footnotes (which are technically sidenotes in this case, as they are placed on the side of the page) are as serpentine as the writing in the primary text, taking the reader down divergent paths that lead to new possibilities. The language is rich, and bloody, and textured. One might be tempted to take out a thesaurus, or a history book, or even the bible, after encountering her words. This instinct is not wrong, per say, but the power of Mattia’s sinewy writing is that it forces the reader to slow down – to feel and ingest the words on the page.

One would be forgiven for looking to the writings of others to better understand the form and function of Mattia’s transgressive work. For example, we might look to Walter Benjamin, who Mattia quotes in the epigraph of the book. “It’s not that the past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on the past, rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash, with the now to form a constellation. In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill,” Benjamin writes. This expression of the connection between the past and the present – which can be frozen together at the moment of an image – illuminates Mattia’s insistence on weaving together personal history and ancient myth, producing a constellation of embodied experience and belief. 

If we’re interested – as Mattia is – in thinking about the wounded nature of trans embodiment, we might turn to Susan Stryker, whose essay “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage” is often considered the most important trans text to ever come out of the academy. Stryker finds herself identifying with Frankensteins’ monster, but argues that monsters have a divinely important cultural function. “Monsters, like angels, functioned as messengers and heralds of the extraordinary. They served to announce impending revelation, saying, in effect, “Pay attention; something of profound importance is happening,” Stryker writes.

Stryker suggests that we all confront our monstrous construction in order to challenge the tyranny of the so-called natural. “Heed my words, and you may well discover the seams and sutures in yourself,” Stryker urges. Considering her emphasis on wounds, it's no surprise that Mattia is similarly fascinated with physical (de)construction. But Mattia is just as interested in the sewing together as she is the coming apart, the ways in which embodiment can’t always be contained within a single corporeal form. “Surgery is, after all, only possible by wounding. The sutures cannot hold,” she writes. 

On the other hand, looking for answers outside of the text itself isn’t necessarily the right move, as everything we need is right there on the page. Mattia uses the words of others – poets, musicians, friends, and lovers – to great effect, but the outcome of such bricolage is wholly unique. Moreover, Mattia actually explains the purpose of her writing and how the book came to be what it is. Here is a lacerated (by my own hand) excerpt of that explanation:

“I want to write like that, with the pleasure of negation; not by laboring over the pristine convolutions of a Mobias maze [...] but by opening a wound [...] within this sentence; by placing, between parentheses, the teeming green graft of a minor hour or a major instant, swelling the banks of my syntax [...] with the tinctures of destabilized time…” 

(The bracketed ellipses indicate parentheticals that were too lengthy for me to include here, but are nonetheless essential to the text itself. I do wonder in breaking up this sentence if I have done some sort of violence to it, especially given the book’s suggestion that writing can be a wound. Perhaps what is really illustrated here is the fact that Mattia’s words are nearly un-reproducable outside of their given context.) 

The comprehensive result of Mattia’s distinct style emerges as an artfully disjointed journal of a love story, one that transcends the genre of memoir entirely. History and fantasy are two of the essential sutures that hold the book together and propel it into heretofore unseen territory. “Fantasy is not, in itself, ethical, but it is the means by which an ethics is made,” Mattia suggests. By weaving together Greek and Roman myth (some of the fruitiest myths of all) with the re-animation of forgotten historical figures, she proposes a corpulent, sublime ethics of her own. Eleonor Rykener, a sex worker whose court testimony is often considered the only written record of a trans woman in Medieval Europe, comes to life, speaking Middle English and acting as a confidante and guardian angel to Aurora in her times of need. This is not a re-writing of history or an effort to be trans-historical in a trite, flatteningly optimistic sense. Instead, it’s excavation, creation, transcendence, pushing and pulling time and myth and fantasy. 

More than a personal exposition of pain and pleasure, The Fifth Wound marshals this transcendental quality as a means of resisting the oppressive force Mattia calls Empire. “Empire repeats a single story. Repeating a single story is taxonomy disguised as an act of witness,” Mattia writes. By resisting taxonomy and designation at every turn, the book simultaneously defies the normalizing violence of imperialism, capitalism, and patriarchy, structures that also happen to be buoyed by transphobia. As Mattia writes, only a single book written by a trans woman had ever been published by a major American publisher before 2020. Trans stories were simply not able to be filtered through “The Algorithm,” as Mattia calls it. 

As such, The Fifth Wound is not interested in explaining trans embodiment to the uninformed viewer. “There is nothing more boring than explaining yourself to someone who thinks they want to know you, but wants, in fact, to apply your particulars to the formulation of genus,” Mattia says. Instead, those who read the book are blessedly invited to experience a magical world of her own fantastical creation. The text draws you in – into the world she has spun, into your own mind, into the very mechanics of reading and writing – while also encouraging elastic connections. You won’t reach the end of the book unscathed.