A Purpose to Our Savagery

by Tomas Baiza

A mother struggles with what it means to be Chicana as she searches for her son at a powwow. A delivery driver has a fateful encounter with a voracious customer at the end of the world. A grieving father learns the true identity of the hummingbird that hovers outside his kitchen window. A Mexican cowboy—who might or might not be the Messiah—orders a pepperoni pizza on a Friday night. And a troubled young man develops an unexpected bond with his neighbor’s racist yard ornament. In his debut collection, Tomás Hulick Baiza explores the poetic and mythic spaces between light and dark, where Aztec gods and more contemporary obsessions fight for dominance. With characters who jump off the page, A Purpose to Our Savagery takes readers on a journey through tragi-comic, hallucinatory, and even nightmarish landscapes where he exalts the resilience of outsiders in a world inclined to leave them behind. In the end, Baiza’s stories highlight the extraordinary and mundane challenges that we overcome to make it to the next day.

182 pages, Paperback

Published July 21, 2023

Reviews

[Cassie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'll probably write a more in-depth review at some point but. This fucks incredibly hard, and makes me so deeply homesick.

[Luke Blanchford · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mr. Baiza writes evocatively about Hispanic and other outsider characters with such rich social texture and cultural connection. The ways that shamanic visions flare and upsurge into daily awareness, imparting courage and wisdom to live and die, is both heartbreaking and uplifting.