Almonds are Members of the Peach Family looks at the ways humans process violence, history, identity, and intergenerational trauma. Centering upon the making of a crazy quilt, it weaves together oral history, public record, images, scientific findings, diary entries, statistical data, and memory with few sutures. Sauer's cadence and distillation of evolution is measured out and noted by the pricking of time as fabric, the ache of the hands and heart at work, the sonorous hum of thread pulled when one thing is stitched to another: this body, that body.
Stephanie Sauer is a writer, interdisciplinary artist, and publisher. Her most recent book, Almonds are Members of the Peach Family, won the Noemi Press Book Prize in Prose and was named a best book of the year by Entropy and Big Other. Her debut, The Accidental Archives of the Royal Chicano Air Force, the first artist book of its kind to be published by the University of Texas Press, is featured in City Lights Bookstore's "Pedagogies of Resistance Recommended Reading List." Sauer has earned fellowships from Yaddo, Sacatar, and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, as well as a So To Speak Hybrid Book Award, Barbara Deming Award for Nonfiction, and two Sacramento Metropolitan Arts Commission grants. Her book works have been exhibited at the De Young Museum, the Center for Book Arts, and the National Library of Baghdad. She is the founding editor of Copilot Press and a co-founder of A Bolha Editora and Praça. She teaches writing in Stetson University's MFA of the Americas, serves as a leadership and creativity coach, and develops Lólmen Publications for the Shingle Springs Band of Miwok Indians.
"Stephanie Sauer's Almonds Are Members of the Peach Family, is an immaculate meditation in prose, masterfully and poetically aligned. Examining cases from domestic abuse, to national (in)security, to cultural and familial traditions and stigmas, Sauer's triangulation of histories, theories, and experience revalorizes the overlooked revolutions charged by women in both public and private spaces. Her cadence and distillation of evolution is measured out and noted by the pricking of time as fabric, the ache of the hands and heart at work, the sonorous hum of thread pulled when one thing is stitched to another: this body, that body. This is a time capsule, a manifesto—at once unraveling and embodying the weight and force of a woman at work." - Laurie Ann Guerrero
"Imagine air composed of salt and the opposite of salt: someone who can no longer excrete, weep, kiss, or vomit. Who is dead? 'The air is composed of saline and the once living,' writes Stephanie Sauer, writing the brink-verge of an impossible city, a city (Rio) that 'has no regard for survival.' Entering the work through this magnetizing and uncompromising 'day,' the book's morning or start, the reader is soon breathing night: Judith Herman's concept of trauma, of what it will take to recover ideals of family or psychological life in the time that follows an atrocity; the 'bruised little girl flesh,' and the encroaching violence of an authoritarian regime. Almonds Are Members of the Peach Family is adept at turning this narrative over to show us the 'back-stitch,' the parts of living like this (with others) that we rarely get to see. I was very touched by Sauer's precision and sweetness as she decocts the lineage story of the grandmother, in particular. The weight and sorrow of elegy are performed in a non-dominant verse that has enough space in it for other worlds, other languages and new sounds. Because: 'I am unable to fill in the ligaments. I am working with bones and a superficial filling would be untrue.' There's information, here, about what it would take to discharge something long held or contained in somatic memory. Tell the truth about what happened to the body, this book seems to say. Tell the truth about the time in which the body got to be a body." - Bhanu Kapil
