THE KÁRMÁN LINE (Rescue Press), the title of Daisy Atterbury’s breathtaking, genre-blurring memoir in poetry and prose, refers to the threshold between Earth and outer space. “Above the Kármán line,” she writes, “space is considered free.” Atterbury uses the line as a metaphor that wraps around the places in this oddly mesmerizing travelogue: Spaceport America, Truth or Consequences, and the Very Large Array. In reexamining a relationship, as well as the poet’s ability to navigate all spaces in its wake, the narrative maps these landscapes of great atmosphere, bringing the realm of the celestial to the desert floor and vice versa. “We need a language of turbulence to calculate our shape,” Atterbury writes, charting the course.
What We’re Reading: The Kármán Line
A genre-blurring memoir in poetry and prose, The Kármán Line orbits between desert landscapes and celestial realms.
By Molly Boyle