Song of the Shank

"Truth often has to masquerade as falsehood to achieve its ends." So the narratorial voice of Jeffery Renard Allen's Song of the Shank summarizes the inner self-justification of a con man, but so also it ellipsizes its own relationship to a largely forgotten history. The geography is not of this world. The sequence of events is not as one would find in a well-researched biography or documentary film about its putative subject, Thomas (Blind Tom) Greene Wiggins. Devilish miracles happen at the...