The Five of Coins
A review of The Fifth Wound, by Aurora Mattia
Book 1
I know of swimming naked in a pond secondhand, the lusty imagination and its precursor declined invitation from a friend-or-something-more. The combination of body and skin and sun and eyes and touch and water and warmth and stone was all too much too soon for me an ask I couldn’t yet answer. Last summer, then absence, now a year grown more into self and body, and renewed possibility—wondering if I will answer differently this time. Reminded by this gulf of Aurora reminiscing so briefly and casually that is still surprising to me the reticent and shy and ashamed how spacious a world there is awaiting my deeper self-acceptance.
Chapter One is resplendent with writerly poetic permission to inject all manner of linguaphilic excess into what every corner and Scorpiotic fold of what is banally termed “prose,” meaning anything that is not poetry. Heed the example and run with it into every desire of unpublished work, that “lurid mess of...manuscripts,” every thought and whim that strains against self-imposition towards formal structure in both the micro and macro sense, the word, the sentence, the chapter, the epic saga.
Take permission to abscond with all the adverbs-on-top-of-adjectives in your heart and just neologize them for how they can feel to you, do feel to Aurora: adverbsontopofadjectives.
I’m fascinated with the questions about the whirlwind introduction to the narrative space of the novel. Who is the narrator? What is their relationship to the author? I think part of the process starting off with this book is about allowing for the time (via pages/chapters) that is just plain needed to let the meta impressions of book and author and context all do their annoyingly slow work of fading away. I met the author at a reading in town before I knew one word of what the book was about. I was excited by the form, by the discussion and stories of that event regarding Townes Van Zandt as seminal influence on Aurora and redacted lyrical muse in the footnotes. I’ve flipped to the back cover multiple times while reading so far, just to look at the tag at the bottom of the cover that says “Fiction / Nightboat Books,” just for confirmation of the distinction between the world in which I and Aurora the author and Texas country legend Townes all exist, versus the first-person narrator that was in a relationship with Ezekiel, that spent a spell in mythological Greece among the Siren and Odysseus’s travels. I pause often to reread sentences, the prose structure such a loose-grade sieve that falls into poetics so freely and dearly. Reminder from Chapter 1, yet again, like the cover: work of fiction, don’t fall in love with her. Okay, trying my best here.
These words are starting to carry like song, like dreams. Dreams, truly! They dance in and out of the waking plane, early morning snooze button tales of encountered Saints and Sirens, a whole conversation in bed with one such woman speaking in Middle English (or is it Olde?) for pages upon pages of pyrrficte spaikyng (::woman-shrugging::). Townes is ghost of blacked-out lyrics, the synoptic footnotes ever more wondrous in their clarification (oh, wow, really? That lyric was about this?). There is a snake and a lover and so many fairies encountered. My impression is the sense of being carried along by sandman’s lyrics, and I reach a chapter end, bookmark it, then rub my eyes and lose sight of the thread by the time I reach the bedroom door. I love it. I want to continue to be carried along this way forever; I want to write so as to do the same for others.
Book 2
Departing the contemporaneous nature of read-recap cycles earlier, in Book 2 and beyond (was there a Book 3? There were appendices) I just let the captivating lyricism of the author as writer and protagonistic projection into the page, the tumult of multiple violences upon her body, the reeling, the grasping towards sanities and sure friends and unsure rekindling Ezekiels. I kept going along with the frenzy, breathing awash in the seafoam of thought and emotion and song lyrics and sedative allergies. Right to the end, I did not stop until all its waves had towed me under, the hope of finding a future reprieve that puts the doom of drowning out of front of mind. In a good way. When I know that the best cleanest feeling in the shower is to soapscrub my face with a washcloth under the streaming head, the momentary encounter with waterboarding breath a necessary fact of the need to reach the unknown unseen under-understood crevices of my somehow middle-age testosteronic malodorous face. The stickyclean skin afterward worth the oilslick dermabrasion of self-applied enhanced interrogation.
What feels like a long time ago, in the first winter of my awareness of Isobel, I read Dream of a Woman, the short story collection by Casey Plett. Any prolonged experience of first-person trans life is certain alchemy for travels to the mental spaces of gender that exist beyond empathy. Deep empathy. Identification. Embodied transference. Identifying-with-ness. Aspirational in a very pointed way. Specificity of the absolutely right words given to thought and feeling and yearn and shame and loathe, and their body-positive antonyms. I said in fewer and less certain words to Casey when she came to town for a reading, when I presented my gender status update known as “The Cathedral” in an opening moment.
Months later, Aurora arrived with this book for another event, and I’m now finally coming to terms with the power of a good trans fragmentary mycelial compendium of blended visceral reality with dissociative fantasy, with somatic mythos, the living in the eternal. If it weren’t so many kaleidoscopic mirrors for alternately Scott and Isobel to gaze into, to vie with egoistic grabs for waking attention and personality primacy, with all the dysphoric pain and nonbinary hesitation to take a profound and definitive step further under the umbrella, if not for the doubts I would profess whole and easy love for every page of this book. I do, still, love it, that is, but it comes with all the complexities of a real love, not a projected parasocial Twitter fantasy gestated in Ezekiel’s mind for years. It is a full tarot reading, taken with an accepting neutral face when challenging cards come up, when a favorite arcana flips inversed. Take it, use it, deal with it, make moves, action, progress from it. Work at this relationship, at the gift of its foresight. The Fifth Wound is Love, not a bad trip, a difficulty, a good Tribulation.