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 Docume