A Purpose to Our Savagery

Book excerpt: 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, Tom&á s 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.