In her poetry, drama, political journalism, and fiction, written in the supple rhetoric of nonstandard Black English, Alexis Deveaux has explored the political, economic, and psychological contradictions facing black Americans and Third World peoples. Like Richard Wright, her aesthetic grandfather, Deveaux does not believe literature functions as an abstraction. Instead she feels that art should confront head-on the racial and economic inequities in American life. While she paints a painfully mimetic portrait of class oppression, it is not one which is tinted by defeat. If anything, her characters ultimately triumph by virtue of their courage and collectivist human values. By placing lower-class black people at the center of her artistic world and by forcing her readers to examine not only the characters' anguish but their victories, she creates an art infused with her own version of a black aesthetic, embracing the realities of hope and despair, beauty and...