Courtesy of Daisy Atterbury

Daisy Atterbury’s ’10 newly published poetry collection, “The Kármán Line,” is an experimental work that blends the landscape of the American Southwest with the frontier of space. The work is an exploration of queer and colonial narratives within the contexts of boundaries, bodies and binaries. 

The Kármán line is a mathematical concept that describes the boundary separating Earth’s atmosphere from outer space. Atterbury first came across the concept while reading “The Wind and Beyond,” an autobiography written by mathematician Theodore von Kármán. 

“The title really intrigued me because it got me thinking about what’s beyond the wind,” said Atterbury. “I had an interest in the Kármán line very early on because it’s this boundary that’s human and mathematically constructed, but it influences national borders, which are so finite and solid.” 

The Kármán line has been at the center of controversy in discussions regarding the lack of legally and politically recognized boundaries in space — particularly in the wake of space tourism. 

Atterbury’s collection was reviewed by poet Adrienne Raphel in the Paris Review, a prestigious English-language magazine. 

“Reading The Kármán Line is a trip – to the edges of space, genre, gender, geography, and sense,” wrote Raphel, in an email to the News. “Atterbury warps time and space — The Kármán Line has its own ineffable yet irrefutable laws of physics.” 

Atterbury’s inspiration for the book’s setting — the American Southwest — is drawn from their own experiences living and growing up in New Mexico. Through these experiences, they were able to witness firsthand the effects of colonization on Indigenous communities. 

In particular, they were drawn to the way that scientific research has been intertwined with continued displacement of Indigenous lands. 

“My parents moved to Shiprock, New Mexico, which is part of the Navajo nation, so my upbringing was within these colonial contexts. I was just very attuned to the different cultural histories here and the contested ways that people talk about history,” said Atterbury. 

Atterbury cites the involvement of New Mexico in the Manhattan Project and this nuclear history in their book, as well as how physics concepts are still incorporated in the production and execution of U.S. defense systems. 

Their inspiration for “The Kármán Line” also emerged from accounting for their own identity and positionality in the American Southwest. According to Atterbury, this work resulted from them asking themselves how they “respond to colonial history with [their] own body.” 

As a lecturer in the gender and sexuality department at the University of New Mexico, Atterbury was influenced by queer history, especially in the context of Indigenous history. Much of our notions of gender and sexuality are “informed by colonial dynamics,” they said. 

“We inherited a lot of binary thinking from European colonization,” said Atterbury. “It’s affected the way we move through the world — trying to undo those colonial narratives — and as a queer person, to learn how to find new language and live differently.” 

According to Atterbury, writing has given them a space to explore “new ways of knowing” themselves. 

“The Kármán Line” opens with a list of various places — from cities to scientific laboratories to commercial hubs to mountain ranges to bodies in the cosmos. For Atterbury, these widely different locations describe a multilayered, overlapping way of relating to place and identity. 

Part of that is due to social media, said Atterbury. 

“We’re never just where we are,” said Atterbury. “We’re constantly being constructed by and imposed on, and in touch with so many different places and contexts at once. We never are just limited to a singular moment or experience. It’s very simultaneous, so places that are referenced in the book are different historical markers that I touch on.” 

Atterbury’s own life has been marked by various places — moving from New Mexico to New Haven to New York City to back to New Mexico. While Atterbury misses the big city, they have found joy in working with students with similar upbringings, who “are trying to piece together the colonial history [of New Mexico].” 

In an email to the News, Atterbury’s editor, Alyssa Perry of Rescue Press, commented on the simultaneity of the book. 

 “The Kármán Line is oblique and exact, sensuous and distant, serious and playful, lyric and direct, tethered at once in past, future, and present.” She added, “It’s so fun to move from declarative sentences to archives to a feelings wheel in the space of a page.” 

This idea of simultaneity is also present in the way Atterbury views poetry. 

They channel this simultaneity in their teaching of queer theory classes, where this element encourages students to depart from “conventional writing forms.” 

“You can have something said in multiple ways, or you can use abstraction, which makes it feel like there are many more tools that words offer,” they said. 

More specifically, this offers a way for them to break free of traditional Western rational thought in writing, which imposes ideals that “we don’t realize we’re even subscribing to.” Breaking free from these conventional forms was an apt and necessary step in writing histories of queerness in the Southwest. 

“Indigenous people didn’t identify with Western ideas of gender and sexuality. Additionally, during the Manhattan Project, a lot of queer life was suppressed, but it always finds a way. Even in spaces of severe repression there are ways for people to live their lives,” Atterbury reflected. 

“The Kármán Line” was released on October 15.