In The Kármán Line, Daisy Atterbury’s narrator drives their readers through the wide expanses of New Mexico in a little blue Ford Fiesta, from Santa Fe to Spaceport America. The route is circuitous; we go by way of a personal and collective geography, stopping everywhere from Brooklyn to White Sands Missile Range, from “Your Secret Swimming Pool” to Fifth Avenue, the Cottonwood Mall, and the Meteorite Museum in Albuquerque. 

As we listen to static on the radio, our thighs sticking to the leather seats in the heat of New Mexico’s I-25, we are simultaneously taken on a more metaphorical, metaphysical journey through space (and time) - from troposphere to exosphere. Because The Kármán Line is no mere roadtrip through the American Southwest. In fact, the book cannot quite fit within any genre or border - prose/poem, theory/essay, meditation/narration - much like how the narrator’s body, which they describe as “imprecise and unwillingly contained,” does not fit within the bounds of a gender binary. The Kármán Line is a thoroughly, albeit quietly, queer text - not so much refusing a genre as it is spilling out of the genres it’s been assigned. We revisit childhood memories in Sante Fe Plaza and Shiprock; we learn about wildfires and the color of uranium at the Rocket Inn in Truth or Consequences; and we read Tinder profiles and DMs in Albuquerque. Atterbury puts them all together seamlessly in conversation with fragments from theorists like Édouard Glissant and Karen Barad, with mathematical equations, and with applications for Mars simulations. 

Still, what Atterbury has written in this debut collection is, at least in part, a meditation on space and place. Their narrator is taking space from a relationship and has become fixated on the Kármán line, which is “the altitude at which the Earth’s atmosphere ends and outer space begins.” There are no borders in space, but below the Kármán line, the air belongs to the country below it. 

This line might start as a way of thinking about the space one needs or doesn’t need in a relationship - the space between self/other - but it quickly also becomes a way for Atterbury to examine space as a colonial and capitalist project. “Space, enough absence, is at a premium and must be cleared to be filled,” writes Atterbury, as they trace the ways the landscapes of New Mexico have been described as “empty” in order to justify the testing of atomic bombs, the mining of uranium, and more recently, the building of the first ever commercial spaceport. 

In “What the Boundary,” Atterbury’s narrator goes from describing their separation as “star death” to reading studies about how Indigenous and rural working-class communities have “borne the burden of nuclear weapons development in the southwestern US.” They highlight the use of the word wastelanded in a study, define “wasteland” as “empty, desolate,” and connect us back to space and the desert as empty, as wasteland, despite the many communities who call it home. During their time at Spaceport, America, Atterbury reflects:

“A Spaceport, site of boundless desire for the twenty-first-century tourist, is here transposed upon an existing space. That same air was once called empty, its grounds wasteland. It was called go for launch, called Test Site, called Ground Zero. The White Sands Missile Range.” 

Though Spaceport America and the idea of commercial space travel does occupy our narrator’s headspace for a good portion of the book, Atterbury never stops at any one definition of space for long, preferring instead to keep the metaphor moving: “Sometimes when I say space I mean stars. Sometimes I mean what has been made surplus or treated as resource, what relies on the rendering of space empty or elsewhere. I point to this but I wish, far beyond point, to make a space that resists both this narrative of containment and its diagnosis.” 

This is another move that happens over and over in this text: a reflection on the inadequacies of language, the space - the border - between signifier and signified - “the experiences I should have language for and don’t,” explains Atterbury. In “Zones of Avoidance,” they ask: “Is the language of science a zone of contagion, where metaphor bleeds into metaphor, because reality is so far outside the language we’ve reserved for it, we almost glitch?” 

Is Atterbury’s own language a zone of contagion? Or, maybe a better question: is that zone of contagion a bad thing? Or has the language of science been too concerned with preciseness, with boundaries?

Perhaps what Atterbury is getting at is that borders and boundaries make us feel safer even as they contain us. That they are sites of possibility, of encounter, as much as they are sites of restriction and policing. “In fact, the line between earth and space is a riot,” writes Atterbury, “And a rocket manifests its power over and through.” 

In moments like this, The Kármán Line seems to rejoice in the act of breaking through a border, crossing a threshold. It is a moment of joy and connection in a book that deals with some stark realities of separation. This is also something the book nods toward - the potential sexiness of a border or boundary crossing, which feels, inexplicably, connected to both language and queerness. “Declarative sentences say they’re straight but make out in locker rooms” begins Atterbury in “Parts for the Whole.” Then, in the next paragraph (or stanza): “The language for what I need folds in me like a dead thing.” Later in the same section, Atterbury’s narrator says a coming out story “drips slowly” from their ears and that they “fantasize about a space hub in a desire to permeate wetly.” Space as a metaphor and as an object and as a full rather than empty thing is also, as it turns out, about desire. More than anything, I read this book as a way of grappling with a person’s place - in a landscape, a hometown, a [gendered] body, a relationship.

Near the end of their visit to Spaceport, in “Spaceport America,” Atterbury’s narrator looks up and notes, “The air above me is full of invisible material and energy. It is full of matter–and memory.” In this moment, they are able to really see how full space is and can be, how full they are. I can’t help but connect this to place. 

“I’ve been told to use setting,” explains Atterbury in what I read as a comment on their own writing about place. “But setting is its own self-making.” And I think Atterbury resists that urge to use setting, preferring instead to help a place come alive, help us see how it is its own self-making.