Daisy Atterbury: On Negotiating Boundaries, Experimental Writing, Lucy Lippard, and Their Debut Collection ‘The Kármán Line’
Traveling through the New Mexico desert to Spaceport America, the narrator in Daisy Atterbury’s collection The Kármán Line (Rescue Press, 2024) ruminates on the boundaries between themselves and their ex and widely agreed upon geographical—and atmospheric—boundaries. Charting the course of a queer relationship through the voice of the narrator, whose ex now lives—unreachable—in a Mars simulation, we, too, experience the profound solitude of places forgotten by time, existing outside of the capitalist society we are familiar with. Atterbury’s work as an academic and their experience growing up in New Mexico both inform their writing; they explore the space they call home, questioning colonist and imperialist narratives that have left their legacy.
The book stretches upward to the point where Earth’s atmosphere becomes space, and when I reached that point in the collection, I rested in the same contemplative, discerning mind of both the narrator and Atterbury. I reached for books off my own shelves to continue the exploration, revisiting the work of JB Jackson and Lucy Lippard, through the lens of Atterbury’s deliberate, experimental mix of prose and poetry. The Kármán Line wonders, asks, and searches in the surreal landscape of the American Southwest, digging into the land’s relationship to space and the Trinity site, all the while letting time expand and collapse.
Sydney Bollinger: I want to start with the collection’s title, The Kármán Line, which is also the altitude at which the Earth’s atmosphere ends and outer space begins. On page 18 you write: “because of the difficulty in determining the exact point at which the boundary occurs, there is still no legal definition between a country’s airspace and outer space. One hundred kilometers is considered an accepted boundary.”
This made me think of the fluidity of boundaries in both nature and relationships, which are prominent themes in the book. How did this idea and scientific concept inform your work on the collection?
Daisy Atterbury: That’s such a robust and searching question and I really appreciate it. I think it captures the movement that I made, as well, in researching the book from a more academic and political interest in this convention, which is an accepted boundary, but has this element of convention to it. The height at which the Kármán line is established is not the only line one could use to determine the end of the Earth’s atmosphere because it is a gradation. So I thought it was interesting that this line had been calculated mathematically by Theodore von Kármán, the Hungarian mathematician. Yet, it’s a social boundary that is negotiated and part of a social agreement that this particular calculation stands as the boundary, when it could exist in different places because the atmosphere is not consistent. That concrete rational logic that also touches on the social has always been a space that interests me.
And, as you said, it feels akin to the way we think about national borders and boundaries, the way we understand these rigidities to be socially negotiated. For me, in writing through this more theoretically, I came to have to confront this question on the level of the personal. At the same time as I was writing about all of this work, I was also living a life and negotiating intimacy with people and working on my own relationship to writing and going through various forms of relationship reconfiguration.
There’s a breakup that’s charted through the book and a renegotiation of intimacy and a question of how that affects the narrator and, for me, it was impossible not to write from that personal angle because the question of the political was being negotiated on a personal level as well. The trajectory for me was starting out with that theoretical and then descending down into something that felt more intimate and more personal and vulnerable, which can be the most raw and most difficult to share for me as someone who is a scholar and an academic and wants to put distance between myself and the reader. It was a challenge for me to let it descend into that place, but I’m really happy I was able to get there with the book.
SB: That’s so interesting. It reminds me of my experience reading the book. I don’t know if telescoping is the right word, but how the narrative telescoped. It gets really small to a micro level and then goes back out to the macro level. I felt that it really spoke to not just the personal experience, or even the events you discussed in the collection, but also how grief can feel that way, too.
One of the lines I really liked was in “Uranium Yellow:” “I’ve mourned your passage / and I’ll do it again in fiction / where sleeping dogs / howl at the moon.”
It struck me because I often experience grief in, specifically, the death of people we love. But we can also grieve the absence of someone who is still out there. They’re still alive, but we’re not communicating with them. We’re not with them anymore.
How do we reconcile grief without death? And how does writing and art allow us to access and experience these intense emotional states in a way that we just can’t otherwise?
DA: The book starts out with the line “No love deserves the death it has,” which is actually a line by Jack Spicer in one of his poems I became obsessed with. The whole book starts out with this idea of existing in a love that is projecting and imagining its end from the beginning, and there’s a slow attrition as well…
The book’s beginning, it keeps going [after the Spicer line] and says, “Fuck! I see about the loss of you before we even begin,” and just the idea of sitting in that kind of knowledge and that intimacy and relationality does have loss built into it. We negotiate loss throughout our entire lives even before those losses occur. That conditions our whole being. Grief isn’t a word I’ve used a lot in the book and I haven’t, perhaps, let myself imagine a way that grief could actually be a helpful process for negotiating some of these experiences of loss as they’re happening and as they’re projected to happen. As a whole, I think Western American culture is not attuned to grief as a process in a way that could be so helpful for us.
Coming out of the COVID pandemic, I look around and I see repressed grief and I don’t see active processes of mourning what did happen. I was someone who lost a family member in the COVID pandemic, and many people did, and there’s just this steady march onward really imposed by capitalism and this more, more, more mentality. Grief and grieving are such a privilege that we would do well to practice and to access, but I don’t know that as a culture we even have the resources and tools to navigate it.
SB: I was really excited to see that Lucy Lippard blurbed your book, because I’m a really big fan of her work. I took a course on “Changes in the Land” while living in Montana, and it focused on the Western United States, which was new to me, because I had lived east of the Mississippi my entire life up to that point. The idea of how grief appears in changing landscapes due to trauma to the land, specifically in the Western US.
In describing a long drive, you write, “slow and dusty, windy in scattered bursts, this place feels like capitalism glitched.” Do you still experience the same type of feeling in these places? And what do you think that means?
DA: So much to say about this and Lucy Lippard, who is such an influence on me and whom I encountered through my own interest in nuclear issues out here. Lucy’s work in Undermining was the first of her books that I read that was really situated in the Southwest that hit me like a ton of bricks. [I found] her ability to document her changing relationship to the land because of moving out here incredibly motivating and moving. Her ability to contextualize a prior interest in land art and massive interventions into conceptual art into the landscape was a focus and an interest for her, until she also came to grapple with moving out to the West and this question of whether these interventions were colonial in themselves.
Undermining is this project that looks at gravel mining and mining practices and thinks about the ways that even the production processes behind major production in the art market are actually extractivist in their own ways. I thought her ability to reflect back on her earlier interests and priorities was so unusual. It’s unusual, actually, to see a writer pivot. That book really drew me to her work.
I grew up in Shiprock, New Mexico on the Navajo Indian Reservation, the Navajo Nation, out in the Four Corners area. My mom was a doctor who worked with uranium miners and ended up being a medical witness testifying in lawsuits to try to get uranium miners and their families compensation from the federal government for everything they went through and all of the health issues that came out of uranium mining. Through her work and growing up in that context and situation, I met Lucy, and Lucy is very interested in extractivist legacies and trying to combat them and think through them out here.
It felt like a real synergy of interests. I’ve learned a lot from her about how to write about extractivism in a way that is smart, frank, and that doesn’t shy away from naming the systems that are producing and reproducing these legacies. She’s constantly trying to make transparent processes and systems that are sometimes opaque or hard to understand, and she captures a way of being in the landscape that resonates with me.
SB: The format of the book blends poetry with prose. What guided you as you wrote? How does the fluid blend of poetry and prose together lend itself to telling this specific story?
DA: I’ve always enjoyed reading experimental prose and experimental prose poetry. There are so many examples of writers I love who work in those forms and formats from Maggie Nelson—Bluets is a favorite book of mine—to someone like Will Alexander, who writes in surrealist prose. At the same time, I didn’t set out to write a hybrid genre book. I thought it would be very difficult to launch. It proved very difficult to place because a lot of poetry presses really want to publish traditional poetry, and presses that publish prose are often looking at non-fiction.
So I rewrote the book multiple times. Many versions of it exist, and some of those versions look like purely a poetry collection or, more singularly, like a series of prose vignettes. In the end, I didn’t feel like either of those versions captured the ambiguity around boundaries I was trying to capture thematically. There’s [already] so much attention to what a border and what a boundary is that it felt frustrating to try to jam the work into one [genre]. It started to naturally fuse together into one work, and I was really lucky with my editor at Rescue Press.
Rescue publishes a lot of experimental work, and Alyssa Perry was the editor I worked with. We exchanged long letters and missives between us, and the book really took shape through a conversation that we continued to have together. Alyssa was really open to letting the work look the way it needed to look. I did a lot of edits under Alyssa’s guidance and she was willing to go with me to work with the genre it ended up becoming, and not just conceive of [the book] in a really narrow way. She was also someone I could go to for guidance about section breaks in a really conceptual way. We labeled all of the section breaks [with] different levels of the atmosphere, and we had big discussions about whether those should start from the bottom going out to space or whether you should be descending down to the earth, and in the end it does actually ascend, so you end with the last layers at the top…
There’s a Kármán line poem that lands in the layers of the atmosphere where the Kármán line would land, and so to have someone who was as invested in the minutia of the concept was so lucky for me. The genre, the work around it, and all of the hybridity that exists in the book came out of my desire for the book and meeting someone who was willing on the publishing end to entertain those and to see the vision.
SB: That’s an incredible journey to hear about the collection and it’s so interesting how the book has to defy the boundaries of genre to exist in the way that it needs to exist. Why did you choose to have the layers of atmosphere ascend rather than descend?
DA: I wish I could loop Alyssa in on this and recreate some of our conversations. There was a question of whether the book should land in groundedness and there was also a relationship trajectory [in the collection]. I felt very strongly, with the relationship trajectory and the intimacy that’s negotiated and ends in a kind of breakup, that there should be a strong sense of groundedness at the end in terms of the narrator’s arc and realization that their relationship to this person is changing. I didn’t want to leave that very open-ended, but at the same time, I wanted other thematic elements to feel really open-ended. I wanted a speculative quality to the book, to feel as though there are realms beyond those that we know, to be expanding outward, to be aligned with political and social organizing that imagines otherwise. And that imagines without the concreteness of surety in order to think about worlds beyond the ones we know—to realize that we will never have the whole vision for what another social life or political configuration could look like, but we can imagine it. Maybe the role of artists is to do so, and for me that felt like we needed to be going up and out.
SB: Some stories, histories, and experiences, like the Trinity site, can only exist in fragments of people’s memories. How, as writers, do we put these pieces back together to tell a story that seems whole? And how does our way of putting them back together influence that story in the future?
DA: That’s a really lovely question and I’m thinking about scholars who do archival research, some of whom I really admire, who work on the works and lives of people who are not contained in institutional archives, and who are always piecing together counternarratives to the prevailing normative or dominant narratives that we see feature in institutional archives that preserve stories of dominant histories.
Of course it can feel like the other stories and counternarratives are remote or inaccessible. I do remember growing up in the Navajo Nation and as someone who didn’t really belong there but was there by happenstance as a kid, upon moving away, feeling very confused about how to align the nationalist stories I was hearing in school about US history, to shift out of that context and then to never hear of it again, for example… It was very hard and almost felt like being gaslit or trying to understand what the real kind of history was. There’s a lot of unlearning that is involved and I think there’s a lot of conversing with people who are trying to do that work. One person I was just talking to about this yesterday is Dr. Bernardine Hernández, who is here at the University of New Mexico. We talked about researching the silences between the institutional archives and looking for stories.
The last thing I’ll say is navigating my own relationship to queerness and transness has been hugely influential on the way I understand fragmentation of stories, the gaps in the archive, and what a colonial legacy can do to erase whole swaths of people’s histories, while also making the connection that the inheritances we have, the stories we have about sexuality and gender also come from, perhaps, one dominant history where a plethora of other stories exist. That personal search has prompted me to seek out alternative histories constantly to even find myself. It’s provoked an alignment with others and with people who are doing the same, and it does require living in fragmentation and embracing that as a form.
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Daisy Atterbury is a poet, essayist and scholar. The Kármán Line (2024), a St. Lawrence Book Award Finalist and debut book of experimental prose and poetry, was published by Rescue Press in October, 2024. Described as “a new cosmology” (Lucy Lippard) and “a cerebral altar to the desert” (Raquel Gutiérrez), The Kármán Line investigates queer life and fantasies of space and place with an interest in unraveling colonial narratives in the American Southwest. Atterbury is the Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of American Studies at the University of New Mexico, and holds a joint lectureship with the Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program. In 2025, Atterbury joined the board of FRI: the Feminist Research Institute at UNM.
