Blood in the Asphalt: Prayers from the Highway

Literary Nonfiction. Art. BLOOD IN THE ASPHALT: PRAYERS FROM THE HIGHWAY chronicles a lifetime spent as a tow truck driver on the lonely highways of the American Southwest. Jesse Sensibar explores reinvention and resurrection through his photographs and his linked collection of short stories, mourning and celebrating loss, gratefulness, and forgiveness. A shrine to the Virgin Mary and a crude cross honoring a dog are portrayed with equal brevity in the photographs, while narrations skip through time and recall hitchhikers, old friends, drunks, car accident victims, junkies, and fitness trainers. Winding through Arizona, California, and Mexico, Jesse Sensibar contemplates his need to record roadside shrines, grieve the numerous former lives one person can live, and succumb to the pull of a highway that gives and a highway that takes away. In this disappearing American West, the ghosts and saints of the highway keep watch over the weary travelers compelled to document and remember.