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Poetry Friday: The Noir Edition

Jesse Sensibar

Flagstaff-based poet and tow truck driver Jesse Sensibar has a new book of poetry out. It’s an updated edition of his previously released 2018 collection, Blood in the Asphalt: Prayers from the Highway. The Noir Edition has new essays, poems and photographs. Sensibar is fascinated with roadside shrines, which he sees a lot of while he’s out working on Arizona roadways. He often stops at the sites to write. In this week’s installment of Poetry Friday, Jesse Sensibar talks about the difficulties of being a poet in the world right now, and he reads from his new collection of work.

JS: My name is Jesse Sensibar. I’m a sometimes poet and sometimes wrecker driver working out of Flagstaff, Arizona.

In these days of COVID, I really don’t know how else to reach you except like this. There are no poetry readings, no open book stores. It’s tough.

So, anyway…welcome to the Noir Edition of Blood in the Asphalt: Prayers from the Highway.

Life moves at breakneck speed, like a freight car on the singing rails carrying the legend of Bozo Texino. Or an old Butterfly Hood Kenworth wrecker highballing and rolling heavy with souls on that black ribbon of life and death we call the highway, past mile marker signs and the roadside shrines to the lost. It’s these things I document because they don’t last, just like us, beauty fading into loss like the dust in the ink of the RIP’s behind the names at the back of this book.

Credit Tolsun Publishing

So here I’ve tried to document a little more of that, the love and the loss, the vengeance and forgiveness. The words and talismans we hold close as our breaking hearts run out and run dry, that we are left with is the blood on the asphalt. Remember us every time you pass a dusty fading shrine on the side of the highway or the image of Bozo Texino grease penciled on a rusted railcar. We are all only dust and legend. I’ve tried to save just a little of that. Enjoy. 

(Music: Bass Walker)

Poetry Friday is produced by KNAU's Gillian Ferris. If you have an idea for a segment, drop her an email at Gillian.Ferris@nau.edu. 

Gillian Ferris was the News Director and Managing Editor for KNAU.