Leaving the Atocha Station
Leaving the Atocha Station
Author: Ben Lerner
Desc: Adam Gordon is a brilliant if highly unreliable young American poet on a prestigious fellowship in Madrid struggling to establish his sense of self and his relationship to art. What is actual when our experiences are mediated by language technology medication and the arts? Is poetry an essential art form or merely a screen for the reader's projections? Instead of following the dictates of his fellowship Adam’s "research" becomes a meditation on the possibility of the genuine in the arts and beyond: are his relationships with the people he meets in Spain as fraudulent as he fears his poems are? A witness to the 2004 Madrid train bombings and their aftermath does he participate in historic events or merely watch them pass him by? In prose that veers between the comic and tragic the self-contemptuous and the inspired Leaving the Atocha Station is a portrait of the artist as a young man in an age of Google searches pharmaceuticals and spectacle.