Sarah took the act of riding in a car/truck – something many of us do on a day-to-day basis without a second thought – and fleshed it out into a full-bodied experience. She hit on every one of the senses to give the audience a chance to experience it the same way she did.
She tells about the sounds of the truck, “we sang How’s it going to be,” she tells about the tastes of the truck, “we ate teaberry ice-cream,” the feel, “in those carpeted seats,” the sight, “in the grip / of metal and plastic,” the only sense she doesn’t implicitly refer to is the smell of the truck, but that can almost be assumed from the line “like premium gasoline in its tank.”
You can feel the contradicting emotions that this truck elicits from Sarah from the lines “it cradled me across the coast,” an act of love and compassion, to the line “Each time it drove me… I always felt like puking.” Which also translate into the contradicting emotions she feels about her father, something that can be picked up from the back and forth of referring to him as “father” and “dad,” one of which is clearly more formal than the other.
All in all I liked this poem, but there is no subtlety to it. There were no lines that had me guessing at their meaning or their underlying feelings; it’s all out in the open. To change this, the poem could be rewritten or rearranged to put more focus on the metaphors.