Leaving the Atocha Station

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. 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? Is poetry an essential art form or merely a screen for the reader's projections? A witness to the 2004 Madrid train bombings and their aftermath does he participate in historic events or merely watch them pass him by?