Road Film

Framed as a cinematic odyssey, Road Film owes its debt to the famous road movies from the 1960’s - 70’s. From start to finish, every reader rides shotgun on a trajectory into an American imagination full of grace and angst. Loesser’s mix of prose and verse displays the best of the tradition of the New Sentenceand his work as a journalist in New York, 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 in the isolated corners of our homeland. Throughout Road Film, the driver races between two coasts; he jumps from the city into the wildernessalways skirting the moribund American suburbs, and though there be familiar faces, the author’s route never leads toward that simple place called home.