mars2k 's review for:

The Fifth Wound by Aurora Mattia

4.0

challenging dark emotional inspiring reflective sad medium-paced

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Took me a while to attune but it was worth the effort. Esoteric and erotic, bloody and baroque.

“I saw my exboyfriend for the first time in three years...” is a story already, which is to say, it’s an answered prayer, which is to say, it’s gossip, which is to say: it’s available for the making of meaning, so there was all the more reason to think narratively rather than consequently.

I had assimilated, at that time, into a delusion of liberalism—selfidentification not with my sisters but with the imperial dream of the hero’s journey, with the white woman’s dream of her own exceptionalism, her pretension to the role wounded healer—a hypocrisy of vision, a state of isolation mistaking itself for individuality, for uniqueness, that is, mistaking implosion for the formation of a pearl

Every week I inject estrogen into my ass, because once you said ‘you are pretty, but not beautiful’ and now I am so beautiful that no one understands how ugly I felt when you looked at the moon.

A gaze alone does not constitute a gesture.