MORE THAN ANY other fast-food restaurant, Wendy's has tried strenuously to bridge the gap between fun food and healthy food, between the carnivalesque, kid-oriented atmosphere of McDonald's and more grown-up, diversified chains like Subway. In the thirty-two years since its founding, Wendy's has ditched garish employee "Wendy" uniforms, introduced a salad bar and baked-potato menu, and replaced the cartoon Pippi Longstocking rip-off Wendy with the Middle-American mug of founder Dave Thomas. And all this without having to sacrifice its industry standard burger-and-fries menu, their toy prize promotional tie-ins, or the reconstituted goodness of the indeterminately flavored "Frosty" shake.

It's perhaps these strained efforts to cater to every possible fast-food consumer whim that make the chain the perfect target for Joe Wenderoth's Letters to Wendy's. The book, the first release of newborn poetry-and-fiction publisher Verse Press, is made up of a series of comments written over the course of a year on Wendy's customer-feedback cards.  Wendy's asks its customers to "TELL US ABOUT YOUR VISIT," and Wenderoth spares no detail, from fantasy couplings with its nubile mascot to the challenges of ordering after ingesting marijuana brownies. The postmodern koans work, in part, because they conjure images so incongruous in the context of a Wendy's visit. The mechanistic rituals and the bland, uniform settings of the fast-food transaction have become so naturalized that we're not even aware of them until something disturbs the artificial tranquility -- like Wenderoth replying "Daddy fucked me!" when another man in line grouses that "You'd think they had to grow the potatoes!"

Not all of the letters to Wendy's are so crude, though a sense of the pornographic certainly pervades the text. Wenderoth considers a giant penis made of meat ("wonderful to think of, but … to actually bite it … monstrous") and politely inquires about the availability of "hot wet pussy-dickhead shakes." The book is not simply smutty, however -- sexual obscenity overlaps with social obscenity in a medley clearly informed by highbrow social theory.  Wenderoth is a poet and English professor in southern Minnesota, and his work directly engages such hallowed academic topics as capitalist aesthetics, fetishism, and repression. When Wenderoth's brownie-induced reverie impedes the ordering process, he writes, "I was overwhelmed by the chicken sandwich pictured there, but had no words for it.  I kept saying, 'there, that one … the man dressed like a woman.' It's hard to get served when one understands the signifier as a process." These more philosophical ruminations can make Wenderoth sound like an overeducated Jack Handey; it's hard to know how seriously to take his loftier passages. If he simplifies complex arguments, perhaps he does so self-consciously. This is theory to accompany an order of Crispy Chicken Nuggets and a Biggie.

Shockingly enough, Wendy's itself seems uninterested in what Artaud or Derrida might have to say about their restaurant. The spokesperson at Wendy's International corporate offices, in Dublin, Ohio, told FEED he had never heard of the book. If Wenderoth had any dreams of corporate sabotage, he'd probably have done more damage with a couple of rocks and a can of spray paint. But it's probably unfair to compare him to Jose Bové; Wenderoth's style is more revolution-from-within, exploiting the quasi-democracy of consumer complaints. The genre-bending, analytical, yet gleefully libidinous response to the Wendy's experience seems schizophrenic, but perhaps Wenderoth's point is that a response to mass culture is necessarily so. The restaurant is hyperfamiliar and comforting, and at the same time grimly antiseptic and homogenous, making it an all-too-typical part of American mass culture. We may feel ambivalent about these products, but we lap them up anyway. Wenderoth's verse writes this emotional morass of lust, satisfaction, and alienation on the comment cards provided for just such a purpose.  It's a medium that fits its content perfectly. He is, after all, just telling us about his visit.