The Kármán Line

The Kármán line describes the altitude at which outer space begins and national airspace ends, where the body in flight achieves orbit. In The Kármán Line, a heartsick narrator drives across the Jornada del Muerto to the commercial rocket launch site Spaceport America. Tracing back from outer space to the American Southwest, their account glides between off-planet simulations, uranium mining, queer erotics, military rockets, galactic zones of avoidance, and settler logics to arrive in the "outside of outside." In Daisy Atterbury's hybrid epic, colonial histories and speculative futures coalesce into hope for a shared present.   DAISY ATTERBURY is a poet, essayist and scholar. Their work has appeared in BOMB, Jacket2, The Paris Review Daily, and Post-45 Journal. In 2022-23, they served as Donald C. Gallup Research Fellow at Yale University. They have been the recipient of a Lost & Found Archival Research Fellowship and Legacy Fellowship from Lost & Found: the CUNY Poetics Document Initiative. Atterbury holds a full-time lectureship in the Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program and Department of American Studies at the University of New Mexico and recently curated the Living Room Series for Poetry at the Center for Contemporary Arts, Santa Fe.   "Daisy Atterbury creates a new cosmology in this innovative text. (Prose? poetry? who cares?). Who needs science when sensual writing like Atterbury's can illuminate the universes." - Lucy R. Lippard "Above the Kármán line—the edge between earth and outer space—air is too thin to be turned into property. Space there is 'free,' untethered from the territorial logic of the nation state. In dazzling prose, Atterbury explores the implosion of the colonial imaginary when thrust to an atmospheric breaking point. Writing from desert drives, sites of radioactive spills, queer loneliness, touristic space stations, they chronicle history at a molecular level—atoms of disaster lodged in the bodies we share and the water we drink. With disarming softness, The Kármán Line erodes the ideology of containment." - Mirene Arsanios "The Kármán Line is a cerebral altar to the desert with a language that is pura canción. Atterbury speaks to and from the corners of the New Mexico desert that take any traveler by surprise, mapping a celestial cartography suffused with a queer and powerful ache for a justice as radical as intimacy. The Kármán Line raises its fist to the necessary ambulatory, this poignant and poisoned desert space continuum, eager to charm and disarm us at once." - Raquel Gutiérrez "Do you want to be transported? By glitch, by star death, by 'radical softness'? The Kármán Line weaves together a landscape of queer science in which the boundaries of the personal and the political are melted by the calm, 'early body logic' of Atterbury's distinctive voice. Dear workers of the earth, it's not working. The objects are tidally locked. The craters are trauma; the aesthetic… is cinderblock. The Kármán Line retraces the contours of love with an openness that retaps the spine into free-sky." - Sara Deniz Akant "Books that matter offer us occasions for thinking the unacknowledged, lived edge of a feeling that counters the mythic edges society is built on: imagined frontiers, national boundaries, gender binaries. The Kármán Line first proffers that edge and then diffuses it. Atterbury's genre-orbiting book—adventurous, curious, imaginative, frightening—slips a narrative of transformation and desire into the lining of a story about atmospheric space, settler-colonial ambition, and the glacial horror of nuclear fallout. This book understands human desire as extraterrestrial, not of this world, yet at the very core of how we can know ourselves at our polar edges: through love that allows the Other to live in us, even when we fall out, and through capitalist greed that annihilates them, unendingly, until we all must live in the catastrophic aloneness of that irrevocable fallout." - Divya Victor