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.
Born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1979, Ben Lerner is the author of three
books of poetry The Lichtenberg Figures, Angle of Yaw, and Mean Free
Path. He has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the
Northern California Book Award, a Fulbright Scholar in Spain, and the
recipient of a 2010-2011 Howard Foundation Fellowship. In 2011 he became
the first American to win the Preis der Stadt Münster für Internationale
Poesie. Leaving the Atocha Station is his first novel.
