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LEAVING THE ATOCHA STATION
By: Ben Lerner
Coffee House Press
September 2011
On Sale: September 13, 2011
186 pages
ISBN: 1566892740
EAN: 9781566892742
Kindle: B005IQBXTI
Paperback / e-Book
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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, Adamโs โresearchโ 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.
 Media BuzzFresh Air - NPR - November 9, 2011
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