Driven by Lemons

Writer(s): Joshua W. Cotter
Artist(s): Joshua W. Cotter
Publisher: AdHouse Books
ISBN: 978-1935233053
Price: $19.95
Page count: 104
Year Released: 2009
Status: in print
Original Source: n/a
Other Collected Edition(s): n/a
Genres: literature
Recommended for Fans Of: avant-garde poetry
Possibly Objectionable Material: coarse language
If You Like This Book, Try: Or Else, vol. 4: The Wild Kingdom
Also in This Series: n/a

Plot Summary
Providing a plot to this book probably does it a disservice, but I'll attempt to write one anyway: The protagonist (a rabbit) is in a terrible car crash. He ends up in a hospital. In the end he appears to be healed, but also transformed. In between these basic plot points there are sequences that can be interpreted any number of ways: fever dreams, spiritual awakenings/deepenings, hallucinations, philosophical tangents.

My Own 2 Cents
If Skyscrapers of the Midwest is Cotter's semiautobiographical novel, then Driven by Lemons is his book of poetry. I mean this not just in the sense of the written word, but also as visual poetry. Although the book begins traditionally enough (at least from an alt-comix perspective), it soon evolves into a series of abstract and semiabstract sequences that are equally beautiful and terrifying (just as the abstract expressionist works of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, et al., are capable of eliciting both reactions at once--at least in me).

In fact, I found the strictly visual sequences more interesting than those sequences paired with the book's many monologues. Stream of consciousness is a narrative mode I'm not generally interested in. I prefer my surreal texts to make a bit more sense (as in Huizenga's The Wild Kingdom). But I nonetheless found this book to be interesting and well worth my time.