The Kármán Line is the boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and outer space, calculated by a Hungarian physicist Theodore von Kármán. Daisy Atterbury’s recent hybrid poetic work, named for this concept, takes up the question of boundaries, literally and metaphorically, as it weaves through geographical and temporal space. Atterbury, a poet and scholar, blends memoir with scientific formulas in pursuit of both defining and troubling questions of selfhood, nationhood, and what lies beyond the Kármán line. I sat down with them to talk about their experience of returning to New Mexico to live and work after years in New York and abroad, to explore myths about the American Southwest, and to muse about the social ramifications of engineering the world.
Can you please give a brief background of yourself as a writer?
I’ve always thought of myself as a writer and always written in my life. The form and format that that took varied over the years. I encountered writers in my 20s who influenced my work and introduced me to poetry. That was when I started doing work that looked more experimental, which allowed me to really push outside boundaries and start to think of myself as a writer in a serious way. One of those writers was Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, who lives in the Southwest and writes these amazing works that are philosophical and look like poetry and prose at different times. She made her own form. And to be introduced to someone who thought about form in that incredibly inventive and exciting way was special to me at the time and helped me conceive of myself as a writer who could do things with language that I hadn’t understood were possible before—that poetry could be an art form and that it could be something wildly inventive and political. That was a real turning point for me. But before that, I’d always written, and had forced my terrible writings on my sisters and on people I knew—ha! It was always sort of in my bones.
What is your relationship with the Southwest?
I’ve spent too long thinking about the American Southwest and how it exists as a myth, as a totally invented space. It’s where I grew up, so I had to contend with it. My family isn’t originally from there. It’s one of the places in the United States where where you’re from originally is felt and lived in a way that I really appreciate. Other cities that I’ve lived in since, including New York, have this blank slate ethos, where people try to forget their past. They become a New Yorker immediately. But the colonial dynamics in the Southwest are still so sore and fragile and fraught that people negotiate a sense of belonging in every single interaction, which was a world I grew up in. I came to appreciate that a lot. There is a feeling on the surface of wrestling with dynamics that were produced through circumstances that occurred long ago, that are reproduced in dynamics that exist in the present. Some of those dynamics look like Frontierism, myths that people place on the American West from within the U.S., but also globally. I remember being in France and people asking me about John Wayne. These Western American icons have circulated and say something about what this place is. It’s a scene of total projection. That projection covers up the violence that occurred there and displacements that still exist. The place is wrapped up in a negotiation early on with belonging, with trying to identify a sense of self, with navigating social dynamics, and eventually I decided I wanted to come back to continue to do that dance.
What is your relationship with the Indigenous population?
I grew up in a region that became a “reservation,” the Navajo Nation in the Four Corners region. My parents moved out there because they were working for the Indian Health Service. My mom worked with uranium miners who became sick while mining uranium for federal work around the atomic bomb in World War II. In my early years of life, I was living in Indigenous sovereign territory, which really informed my relationship to language, my sense of what the US is, of what its history is. The fact that there are sovereign nations within the country is honestly not even a concept that most kids grow up with. My attempt to wrestle with what that meant and my relationship to those spaces was an important part of my early foundations. I think that those conversations don’t go away even outside of the reservation or Navajo Territory. Living in Albuquerque now, there are still many ongoing conversations about who the land belongs to and what reparations looks like or how public delineations surrounding the city deal with the colonial dynamics and the circumstances of the city being a border town. There are plenty of intertribal dynamics and conservatisms that even the tribes themselves have taken up because of colonialism and Western values. So it becomes a conversation that a lot of individuals across social spaces need to reach out and collaborate around. It’s not just trying to figure out what the city looks like coming from one cultural background, because people believe all different things.
Can you give a sketch of how The Kármán Line began to take form as a writing project?
I was writing about New Mexico, about different roads and maps. I was sifting through nuclear history and the history of rockets and nuclear production in New Mexico, which was overlapping with research in aerodynamics. I followed some threads to this Hungarian mathematician named Theodore von Kármán. I couldn’t retrace the steps that got me there exactly, except that the nuclear industry was tethered to the military. The military industrial complex in New Mexico was also funding space research and aerodynamics research. These felt very connected. Theodore von Kármán wrote a memoir called The Wind and Beyond. The title fascinated me immediately. What is beyond the wind? For him, the answer is space. His calculation of the Kármán law was meant to differentiate the Earth’s atmosphere from outer space. It felt so relevant to the thinking I was doing about New Mexico, borders, boundaries, and colonial dynamics that I felt I had to kind of tie loose threads together somehow, even if they weren’t strictly corollary.
How did that memoir hold up as a literary work?
It’s a scientist’s memoir, so there are a lot of notations. Von Kármán also did a lot of research on planes. I ended up seeing some of his archives too, and he filed images of the earliest objects that flew, and had whole collections of thoughts about flight. It was a window into his mind. I hoped to incorporate more of the biography. I thought someone should write an updated biography on Von Kármán at some point. But it didn’t feel like the point for me was to just characterize this person’s life, but to try to think more about that calculation that he’d made, how it was its own kind of fiction, its own frontier as a fiction, and how it feels so relevant to political negotiations that we’re having and next ways that we are going to be navigating and thinking about space, all of which are so informed by how we’ve talked about space in the settler colonial territory where I’m from.
What is your relationship with the “hard sciences”?
I think my interest in the hard sciences has been in pursuing the question, what are the social ramifications of engineering the world? I can appreciate the artfulness and the beauty of the mathematicians’ relationship to discovering and uncovering a language that has its own logic. But then also seeing that logic applied, looking at the institutions and infrastructures around its study, the funding for STEM that comes from and for defense, the military being such a big funder of the nuclear industry and of the hard sciences here in New Mexico. I know that may be different in Europe, the UK and elsewhere. I think in the tethering of defense funding to scientific study, there’s a particular Americaness. And again, it’s so political. In this new US presidency, any interest in an effort to tether science funding to environmental research is being cut. My interest has always been in the social dynamics surrounding research. And also I am sort of fascinated by the languages of science, themselves, but then also perturbed and concerned about the unexplored humanist and social side of these big institutions of research.
The book seems to straddle genres. Did you have one in mind when you started writing?
I really didn’t want to write this book. I thought it would be unpublishable, which was accurate until it wasn’t. I did rewrite the book a few different times to send it out when I was receiving feedback on it or getting notes from editors, from poetry presses or nonfiction presses that wanted to publish something that looked like a traditional book of poetry, or a longer book of nonfiction. There are obviously some presses out there who support work that is more experimental, and I finally found the people to be in conversation with, who were excited to put out the book that I eventually did put out. I think it was just in the process of writing the book itself that I had to give in to the form at some point and let it be this more uniquely structured piece of writing.
How did the text come together at Rescue Press in particular?
I had sent them a version of the book that I had rewritten to look a little bit more like experimental poetry. It contained a lot of the poetry. It didn’t contain a lot of the prose pieces. Alyssa Perry, the editor there, called me and wanted to work on the book. She was excited to be in conversation and to have an extended editorial period, if we wanted to work on it together. And for me, that was really exciting because I didn’t feel like the book was in the final version I envisioned it out in the world. Alyssa painstakingly worked with me, in a way that I don’t think other editors would have been up for, and she initiated that process by writing me a multi-page letter about the book and how she understood it. It really resonated with me from there. I edited a lot and she was open to the edits, to really changing the structure. I included a lot more of the prose vignettes, and I structured it so that there was more of a narrative arc and so that the poetry complemented the prose. We talked about the different voices that appear and whether they’re one narrator, or whether multiple voices or characters come in. It was really helpful to have someone as a sounding board to get to the final structure, and not have to worry about whether or not it would eventually appear in the world. Working without that feeling of self censorship, once I had her vetting and reassurance, was such an incredible gift.
Is there something about the American Southwest and the area of New Mexico that you grew up in particular that you feel like it gets commonly misunderstood and that you want people from other parts of America or abroad to understand?
It’s a place where the myth of the nation breaks down. There’s this very distinct awareness that most people share, that they’re living in a place that used to be Mexico, that contains the sovereign Indigenous nations, that is contingent because there is so much social change that’s happened there. It feels tenuous in a way that is relevant to the moment we’re in. There’s such a fragility in the US right now around what national identity is. I think that it feels transparent in day-to-day interactions in New Mexico, in a way that I haven’t seen in other places. And some of it is through tensions, but some of it isn’t. Some of it is just through a shared understanding that agreements are made, that this is what it is right now, but that it’s not in a final form or that changes are inevitable and will continue, and who really knows what they will look like. It’s a very hard-to-articulate kind of social structure that I have been chasing the language for for a long time.
Are there elements to the desert that bring to the forefront man-made changes to to the natural world?
Absolutely, yes. I was introduced over the last few years to this research collective called the Desert Futures Collective, which is a group of scholars who work on deserts. I felt such a kinship interacting with some of these scholars around the fringe space that is the desert. Most of them work in the Middle East and many are scholars of the Sahara Desert. A lot of them also worked on nuclear issues because much of, say, Europe’s nuclear testing happened in marginal spaces like the Sahara, as by the French government in Algeria, putting some of the more toxic exposure from the research that they were doing off into the colonies. That’s a phenomenon that happened in the U.S as well, in the deserts, at least in New Mexico. It felt so familiar for our trajectory, the way that the desert was treated as a “wasteland” and a kind of uninhabited, non-space that nuclear testing could occur in. We also see the accelerated effects of climate change here, the way that it becomes more and more unlivable. Of course, you have the experience of being a border state and migrants crossing the desert. The awareness of those deaths and how those are affected by climate change as well, the sort of dangers of migrancy, but also the increased urgency of migrancy. It’s this feeling of a trap where the worse the climate gets, the more climate refugees there will be, and border states and marginal spaces feel it first.
Did you have any books that you used for reference or for inspiration?
One of the books that I read when I was thinking about The Kármán Line was America, by John Baudrillard, the semiotics theorist. He did a road trip through the Southwest in the 80s, thinking a lot about the semiotics of the landscape and the various American cityscapes, from the East Coast to Las Vegas, Nevada, and to the Hoover Dam. It’s sort of sociological for him, and he is revolted the whole time, but he’s also kind of dazzled by what he’s seeing and the size and scale of it all. That was a book that I read and found fascinating and kept in my mind as I was writing. His dissociative relationship to the space around him as an outsider, I found fascinating. I understood it and I found it a nice companion through the process. And again, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, who writes these lines of poetry that are almost a full-length line. There are still line breaks, but the lines go across the whole page, and some of her books are printed horizontally. One line of poetry can be extremely long, and people compare her lines to the horizon in the Southwest. I like thinking about her books as a guide for trying to render forms on the page in some way. She came out with a book called A Treatise on Stars in 2020, and I found it really moving that she was working on a cosmology. She’s still thinking about landscape, but she kind of scans up into the stars and incorporates the wider landscape into the book, and that was another another companion at the time.
Were the typeset, the spacing, and the layout of the text intentional or in service of the ideas that you were exploring in in the book?
Spacing felt important to me, as did the amount of white space. It felt important that the book be structured and spacious in this way that the scale of the West takes on. Sometimes just a short poem existing on a whole page was important, allowing certain small statements to take up a lot of space. I worked with Alyssa, my editor, in a really helpful way around structuring the book with the different layers of the atmosphere throughout as section breaks. We had conversations about whether, as we moved through the atmosphere, the book should be going up into space or whether we should be cascading down to Earth. We finally landed on letting the layers expand outward and upward to lend it a more speculative and futurist feeling, even though there was a groundedness that we wanted to bring through the narrative. There’s a short poem called “The Kármán Line” that we placed in the book at the moment in the atmosphere where the mathematical Kármán Line would occur. Those kinds of minutiae are perhaps not that interesting to a reader, but for me, they felt like they mattered. And for Alyssa they mattered, and that mattered all the more to me, that there was someone who passionately cared about the structure of the book and felt that its form could convey something beyond the narrative in the language itself. She really met the book with that care.
Are you working on anything new at the moment?
I started working on a piece that is very short, like a novella or something of that length. It starts where The Kármán Line leaves off many, many years later. It’s post-apocalyptic, after a nuclear apocalypse. It’s called The Creature, and there’s a surviving entity that exists in one of pits in Southern New Mexico, where there is a site for nuclear waste storage in salt caves. The state—and this is not from my book, it’s true—realized that because this site is radioactive, they needed some kind of indicator that this area is dangerous, and people need to stay away. They needed something that could be legible, potentially to future humans or future creatures. So, the state commissioned artists to create pictographs and warning symbols addressed to humans thousands of years in the future, to warn them in case of their encounter that the site is radioactive. They have these signs that are in many languages—English, French, Navajo—but also in these artist-commissioned pictographs in case language has died. For this new project, I have been trying to write into the moment at which those pictographs are necessary. It’s been logistically challenging, but I have a narrator of some kind. So this is the challenge I’ve set for myself. I’ve done some readings of this piece a few times. I started incorporating it in my Kármán Line book readings, and it has been really fun.
The Kármán Line is now available from Rescue Press.
Daisy Atterbury is a poet, essayist and scholar. Described as “a new cosmology” (Lucy Lippard) and “a cerebral altar to the desert” (Raquel Gutiérrez), Atterbury’s The Kármán Line investigates queer life and fantasies of space and place with an interest in unraveling colonial narratives in the American Southwest. Atterbury teaches at the University of New Mexico. Instagram: @halcyondais
Cristina Politano is a writer from New Jersey. Her essays and fiction appear in Identity Theory, The Dodge, and La Piccioletta Barca, among other places. Twitter/X and Instagram/BlueSky: @monalisavitti.
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