The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Letters to Wendy’s by Joe Wenderoth
James Crossley

Joe Wenderoth. Letters to Wendy’s. Verse Press, 2000. 296 pp. Paper: $14.00.

It’s difficult to assess this book with anything other than a description, as it’s nearly sui generis. Each page consists of entries made on a customer comment card at a Wendy’s fast-food restaurant by an unnamed character. No single entry is even a third as long as this review, and although the author is primarily a poet (this is the first in a series of cross-genre works by poets from this publisher), the diction here isn’t lyrical enough to qualify as what’s normally called prose poetry. Several comments do achieve some power, and the best of these also exhibit drollery. A sample page: “Today I walked in and they wrapped me in meat. They stitched the meat to me with empty sentences. They smeared the stitches with faces—I don’t know whose. They wrapped it all up in my voice, but this never really worked. When I spoke you could only hear the faces smeared into stitches the color of meat. So I began, without confidence, to take off my voice.” Themes recur, notably consumerism, pornography, and their conjunction, but there’s no plot to drive the reader through the work, nor a compulsion created by juxtaposed incident and imagery. Certainly, these elements aren’t a requirement of experimental fiction, but without them, the book often compares to the full, loitering paper cup of soda its author describes: “watery, sides melting, barely able to be handled—but there, so very very there, and simply demanding proper disposal.” Letters to Wendy’s retains a bit more effervescence, however. It’s obviously a product of someone who has a fascination with words. Wenderoth exults, “What a joy it is to be alive! . . . to let language have its way.” He goes on to add: “We hang by sentences.” That we do, readers and writers alike. [James Crossley]