At Spaceport America, “the world’s first purpose-built commercial spaceport,” located in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, a variety of offerings await visitors: a tour of the hangar, artistic depictions of the region’s history, a food truck, an open bar, and the opportunity to send a loved one’s ashes into the outer layers of the atmosphere. The questions these features elicit—of desert commercialization, colonial trajectories, and bodily departures—take center stage in Daisy Atterbury’s debut book, The Kármán Line. Atterbury details a fraught journey to Spaceport America, among other destinations, amidst profound interrogations of distance and proximity. In poetry and prose, The Kármán Line unsettles and retools the most fundamental boundaries of earthly life. Crossing all five layers of our atmosphere one chapter at a time, readers join Atterbury in a cosmic exploration of the lines, lineages, and loci that position us—at least purportedly—in the universe.
The scientific and somatic take equal stance in The Kármán Line, each with objects of inquiry that draw them together and agitate their assumed divisions. The book’s eponymous phenomenon is scientifically defined, early in the text, as “the altitude at which the Earth’s atmosphere ends and outer space begins.” In other words, “the edge of space.” And yet, as Atterbury begins to trouble the boundaries between bodies—of lovers, kin, nations, technological apparatuses—thresholds as existentially consequential as the Kármán line lose their empirical grip. “In principle, calculating the altitude of the Kármán line for any planet is simple.” However, “due to inconsistencies in the Earth’s atmosphere this border is approximate.” As distance from space becomes inexact, relations on Earth emerge in a similar light. It is through deeply personal accounts of Atterbury’s own body—what it inherits, how it knows, where it bursts open and closes again—that Atterbury traces the unmaking and remaking of life at a variety of scales. Often, this brings them to questions about the time- and space-altering properties of radioactive and nuclear materials. Of central interest to Atterbury is how these materials have come to dictate the coherence of bodies, landscapes, and narratives themselves.
Atterbury draws frequent and cross-contextual attention to the planetary anxieties and expansionist fantasies undergirding contemporary space exploration. In doing so, they join a growing web of scholars analyzing the imaginative and material implications of outer space as a capacious cultural phenomenon. The book’s content and form may be especially alluring to those interested in physical and conceptual borders, the American Southwest, spatial phenomena, and narrative structure. Atterbury’s mix of lucid and nebulous stanzas guide readers through this spatial inquiry with varying degrees of directness—a poignant kind of choose-your-own-adventure afforded by their blend of styles. Each chapter contains several distinct entries, presented in almost concentric form. The plot refuses linearity. As Atterbury brings a variety of entries and exits into focus—always with playful precision—they ponder astrophysical practicalities and queer sensibilities alike. By the epilogue, I began to wonder: what’s one without the other?
The language of and around space is Atterbury’s principal entry point into this discursive web, as they attempt to square mutually indeterminate junctures of math and law with “the practicality of actually being somewhere.” They reexamine popular suggestions of space as a kind of absence or emptiness, a span, a surplus, a natural order of things, asking, “Is space an analogy for our beliefs, or is it an active presence, a dynamic field?” It is here that Atterbury illustrates the centrality of spatial demarcation—within and beyond the Kármán line—to fundamental dis/associations of empire and its afterlives. Simultaneously, they invite readers to peer at the everyday gaps between these arrangements. Alongside their lamentation over the ostensible impossibility of contending with space on its own terms, Atterbury offers a subtle faith in our cognitive capacity for, at the very least, catching the occasional glitches. “What’s new is language for what we’re missing. What’s old is a collective exhaustion of self-soothing, the feeling of drinking coffee and walking to the other side of ‘room’ vaguely worried, not knowing what you are looking for.”
With their provocation that “knowledge of space can be a nonreciprocal relationship,” Atterbury sets the stage for a broader questioning of how authoritative it is to know and be known by oneself and others. They wonder, “Can I qualify this thing, call it one word, queer, or others, meteoric, burning up on contact, or cratering a hole, binary asteroids approaching the Earth?” And yet, “a meteorite is of the Earth because it lands, however remote its origins.” Atterbury journeys to Spaceport America in the wake of an intense relational rupture, which mirrors other earthly rifts in causing them as much grief as wonder. In this, they traverse interior and exterior landscapes that glisten with familiarity and strangeness. As they revisit prior dimensions of encounter with the “you” for whom they long, they confront the limits of orbiting tendencies, no matter how “tidal.” This, by some accounts, is a quintessential paradox of queerness—that no amount of likeness can overcome the most fundamental of distinctions (you versus me), and therein lies both the eroticism and its antidote. For Atterbury, the irony is more in the edging against our excessive capacities, and in constantly looking for ourselves between things “seen falling to the Earth and then collected” and the “chance discover[ies] with no record of a fall.” Readers sensitive to sustained sentiments of longing may delight in and bristle at how Atterbury catches themself in these waves, only to be submerged by them again.
As readers learn in an introductory list, The Kármán Line spans many places. Among them: the Jornada del Muerto, New York City’s E Train, Alsace–Lorraine, the Cottonwood Mall, and Mars. Several entries have names so frank that unfamiliar readers may suspect creative license: Zone of Avoidance (a Milky Way–adjacent area devoid of galactic matter), The Very Large Array (an astronomical observatory in southern New Mexico), Near Space (the area beneath the Kármán line), Truth or Consequences (a New Mexican town named after a game show)—even Tinder (a dating app named after tinderboxes). The lack of disguise and the tantalizing innuendo in these names resonate in the similarly blunt but suggestive scientific terms with which Atterbury engages: “We understand craters to be measurements of trauma from transiting and colliding objects.” Beyond this introductory list, frequent mention of unspecified “heres” and “theres” reach just as widely. In this ambiguity, a new analytical plane emerges. Drawing prismatic links between these possibly anywhere places—links across centuries, oceans, political orders, and layers of the ether—Atterbury scrutinizes the structural tethers that collectivize at certain registers and splinter at others. Perceptible “only in fragments,” these entanglements are shown to frame the grounds of claims and the claims of grounds. Here, too, Atterbury insists on the contingencies that bodies and land stipulate for one another.
It is fitting, then, that New Mexico—the place “where belonging was first negotiated in [their] nervous system”—features heavily in The Kármán Line. With Spaceport America and a broader, heavily commercialized “space boom” as key ethnographic objects, Atterbury charts multilayered trajectories of regional place-making. They bring struggles of territorial and bodily sovereignty to the forefront of this exploration, situating these newer frontiers within broader arcs of economic promise—a longue durée of projected “booms”—that have hinged on distinct forms of expansion, exploitation, and infection. They pay similar attention to local infrastructures of tourism, especially those romanticizing the desert, American military power, and natural resource mining. Alongside their critiques of investments in private industry over public care, Atterbury homes in on the narrative production of New Mexican land as “empty”—a discursive practice with distinctly colonial orientations, they show. With reference to Traci Brynne Voyles, they reflect on how “these wastelanded areas are, paradoxically, vital, for the colonial project.” Tracing these inscriptions across and through bodies, Atterbury accentuates the profound eroticism of developmental anticipation. At times, their insistence on the dominating essence of place-making in New Mexico—which they connect to language as a declarative force—forecloses opportunity for other orientations to the term. Elsewhere, it brilliantly illuminates the impossibility of universal integration in a dense palimpsest of redrawn lines.
The Kármán Line spectacularly exemplifies how, in the words of Etel Adnan, “Theories are disarmed by the sky’s curvature.” It is an effort to make and unmake space at once—a rare and urgent intervention, amplified by Atterbury’s push for a kind of thinking from discrepancy. The Kármán Line is in direct conversation with the works of Kyoko Hayashi, Elizabeth Povinelli, Alyosha Goldstein, Édouard Glissant, Lauren Berlant, and Karen Barad, among others. I believe it carries striking resonance, too, with the anthropological works of Adriana Petryna, Tim Ingold, Lisa Messeri, and Joseph Masco, as well as with scholars like Sharon Traweek, Susan Lepselter, Sabrina Imbler, Jen Jack Gieseking, Katherine McKittrick, and Lisa Ruth Rand—just to name a few. In its bending of relations between language, space, and bodies, this debut book has grand appeal. Beneath Atterbury’s key question, “Can we tell a story by other means?” sits another: must we tell one at all?
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The Kármán Line. By Daisy Atterbury. Milwaukee: Rescue Press, 2024. 180 pp. $20.00.
