Customer Reviews

Letters to Wendy's

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

This is a brilliantly paced book of hilarious, sad, beautiful and perverted prose poems. It's like Nabokov in that it is simultaneously perverted and erudite. I read almost all of it on the subway this morning and relished the others reading over my shoulder as I read about Frosties, Porn in the morning, Foucault, and spanking Wendy.

Well, okay, it's great to suddenly hear Wenderoth lust after an American Icon/logo (and she gets spanked!). "Letters" is interesting in parts, but by page 150 one starts to feel a sense of diminishing returns while reading this book. How many clever--albeit slightly twisted--aphorisms in a row can one continue to be as hungry for, after all, as, say one of those big double cheeseburgers with the dual square patties. This book lacks the formal variety of Wenderoth's books of poems. Wenderoth is not, as a writer, always best served by forced brevity. And in "Letters" he seems so intent on shocking the reader and it just feels mildly arrogant. I wouldn't dissuade anyone from buying this book, but I prefer the poems full of large breaths and diamond honed crystalizations in Wenderoth's first two groundbreaking books.

Wenderoth has found a new form for poetry--the customer comment card--and filled a series of them with more desire and truth than any restaurant could safely want to know. Imagine the phrase "How can I help you?" finding no compromise. A stunning and dangerous book.

This little book full of little "poems" packs a thunderous punch. Wenderoth manages to incorporate humor, genius, sex, love, pain, disease, etc in an inventive form. Why is this book so great? Because nobody's done it before. Nobody's brave enough to create such literature. This is a new favorite on my shelves of poetry books. It stands out...a blur of genre, a combination of many realms. Absolutely wonderful.

Letters To Wendy's is an incredible achievement: it manages to blend pornography, philosophy and beauty into one big frosty dessert treat. This book is a "Biggie" in more ways than one: it's big on lyrical beauty, humor, sex and thoughtfulness. It's a hilarious and poignant collection of prose poems. As a colleague pointed out today, who else can make the word "employee" sound so beautiful?

I have never encountered a book like this before, laid out in such a snippet-like format where each page is a chapter. I also thought it was interesting that there were no page numbers. Apparently, we were supposed to use the dates of these "sayings" as page markers in the event we found ourselves without a bookmark or some other method of remembering our place. I thoroughly enjoyed Wenderoth's willingness to risk offending people in order to deliver on his point that we are all human, despite our proclivities and weaknesses. Good work.

i read this in the bookstore in one sitting; it is immensely entertaining, & the author has some excellent turns of phrase, plus who has not at one point confessed some horrible secret on a We'd Like to Hear Your Thoughts card, or wanted to do so.

unfortunately some of the letters degenerate into mindless genital-centric bores without any redeeming prose elements, it seems one cannot get away from this in any form of literature. but vague & nebulous social commentary does not belong in reviews so i'll put this tape over my mouth & we'll all be a lot happier.

but for the most part i loved it, very surreal at times & surprisingly perceptive. i am definitely interested in reading more of his work.

I was really surprised by this book. It doesn't work like a novel-- doesn't give the novel reader what the novel reader expects. It is foolish to understand this fact as an indication of the book's being deficient. Its value is more like the value of a book of poems-- a book one can look into, quite at random, again and again, and in which each Soul will surely have her favorites. The worth of the book can be gauged by how intensely one clings to one's favorites, and how elusive they nevertheless remain.

I have read all four of Wenderoth's books (small press publication _The Endearment_ is not available on amazon.com) and this is the one whose words come back to me most often and in the most unlikely places: on an airplane waiting to land, in the swimming pool wanting to stay away from land, driving along a piney curve of Hwy 49 in the Sierra Nevada foothills, floating amid bubbles in the jacuzzi, or sitting quite bubbleless at the office desk. _Letters_ is a brilliant achievement, and yet the poet's future work will surpass it, because he is a writer who continually evolves and stretches language in unusual, alarming ways. This work allows me to imagine myself prone on "the meaty bed of royalty," lying there until I am arrested. _Letters to Wendy's_ is not in fact poetry but a short novel: an invention in both subject and form. Read it or weep.

Most of the other reviews said what needed to be saided. Just wanted to add some stars for an exceptional and unlikely book. The tone is a mash-up between Bukowski and Jack Handey, yet comes across as sublime. How could you not want to read that? Goooooo JOE!