Framed as a cinematic odyssey, "Road Film" owes its debt to the famous road movies from the 1960s-80s. Every reader rides shotgun on a trajectory into an American imagination full of joy and angst. Loesser's mix of prose and verse displays the best of the tradition of the New Sentence--and his work as a journalist in New York as a young man, post 9/11. The result reassembles all the broken episodes collected along the lost highways of America: discarded and violent news reports, local and violent rumors, and the unverifiable stories passed from one traveler to the next.
Much like his previous work, "Touched by Lightning," Loesser uses a reportorial instinct to transfigure the recurrent patterns he finds as a poet in the isolated corners of our homeland. Throughout "Road Film," the driver races between two coasts; he jumps from the city into the wilderness--always skirting the moribund American suburbs, and though there be familiar faces, the author's route never leads toward that simple place called home.