<p><div>Loesser's book is a powerful, collective plaint-a bittersweet sequence of broken love and death songs for everyone who forgets the children, doesn't do the dishes, sleeps with the dog and wants to just once touch something electric before they die. The finality of these obituaries and letters carries with it a catholic understanding for an age unwilling or unable to stop glorifying heartbreaking death and violent love-our impossibly toxic contemporaneousness so thwarted and petty. This penetrating portrait of a disordered and dysfunctional era runs the gamut of loss and dejection-even the horses die without dignity. Terse, pithy language cinches Loesser's tightly wound, universal thread-news staying news indeed. These characters range from insurance executives reeking of cheap airport Bourbon to the sad, desperate children of misfit parents too lost in their own mundane mendacity to properly care for their spawn. They are drug-smuggling grave robbers and geriatric bank robbers, fallen Hollywood starlets and bronco riders and yet so familiar as to be disturbing to the very bone. Each page of this book is a haunting recognition and convincing reminder that if we're not already dead, we're dying.</div></p>

Touched By Lightning

Literature & Fiction

Loesser, Ernest

Poetry

Emergency Press

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.

Road Film

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Loesser, Ernest. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Loesser, Ernest

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Loesser, Ernest. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Touched By Lightning

Road Film