“These are stories about attempting to outrun time; about trying to remember transfemme pasts; about magic touching everything except the possibility of lasting love.”
From a shapeshifting garden somewhere in Michigan to a West Texas town with a supernatural past, from a stalactite cavern in the birthplace of Aphrodite to a secret waterfall in Texarkana: from nowhere to anywhere, Aurora Mattia chases glimpses of paradise. Her gemstone prose shatters into starbursts of heartbreak and rapture, gossip and holy babble, bringing together a cast of spiders, sibyls, angels, mermaids, girlfriends, and goddesses in vain pursuit of their unnameable selves. Their perils are as dense with symbolism as they are refined by desire—if beauty is the labyrinth, it is also the light.
Tied together by the strings of a corset, Unsex Me Here is a dazzling showcase of other worlds near and distant, and the high femme ramblers who’ve found and lost their way through them.
