Daisy Atterbury, The Kármán Line

 

The Kármán line is thealtitude at which the Earth’s atmosphere ends and outer space begins. The Kármánline is the edge of space, as opposed to near space, the high altituderegion of the atmosphere. When they say altitude they’re thinking interms of the human. What is measurable from the ground. Beyond the Kármán line theEarth’s atmosphere is too thin to support an object in flight. (“after stardeath.”)

I’mstruck by Santa Fe, New Mexico-based poet, essayist and scholar Daisy Atterbury’s The Kármán Line (Chicago IL/Cleveland OH/Iowa City IO: Rescue Press, 2024),a hybrid/lyric memoir around space travel, cosmology, planetary bodies and thelogic of landscape, all wrapped around the impossible abstract of the Kármán line,that edge between earth and outer space. As she writes, mid-way through: “Webecome identified with a wound, you said, and I am like sure, let me. I persistin autobiography.” Set in the nebulous between-space of prose poem and essay/memoir,Atterbury weaves her narratives around what is difficult to precisely capture,allowing for the betweenness to capture betweenness in startling ways. Writing ofasteroids in a piece titled “Binary Asteroids,” she offers: “Perhaps likepeople in my life, these stones can be classified as falls or finds: falls,seen falling to the Earth and then collected; finds, chance discover with norecord of a fall. In 1492, a large stone meteorite fell near Ensisheim, Alsace,one of the first known recorded falls. In 1895, my grandfather’s family leftAlsace-Lorraine after it was annexed from France by Germany. When my mother wasforced to enlist in the German army, they fled to the United States.” Opening witha list of “places (in no particular order).” Atterbury’s The Kármán Lineis constructed via a sequence of sections, most of which are composed via prose—“afterstar death.,” “troposphere.,” “stratosphere.,” “mesosphere.,” “thermosphere.,” “exosphere.”and “epilogue.”—as she works through the layers of this particular line, attemptingto discern the threads that accumulate into that single line of thought. And,oh, what distances she travels, even as she focuses on such intricated detail. Asher piece “Roads of the Dead” reads, in part:

The Severan Marble Planof Rome is a carved marble rendering, a map of ancient Rome based on propertyrecords. Its size complicates its ongoing digital reconstruction.

The marble map is ablueprint of every architectural feature of the ancient city, from buildings tomonuments to staircases. The map’s carved blocks once covered a wall inside theTemplum Pacis, but all surviving pieces have been shipped to the floor of aStanford University warehouse to be scanned and catalogued. The 1,186 survivingmarble fragments make up only ten percent of the original marble plan. Using 3Dmodeling, the Computer Science department is digitally reconstructing thewhole.

The Severan Marble Planproject is a study in method. Virtual teams of engineers, archaeologists, andresearchers from the Sovraintendenza of the City of Rome solve the puzzle byusing shape-matching algorithms to digitally construct the jigsaw based onmatching forms. That the process is “painstaking and slow” is no deterrent.

The original plan isdetailed, accurate, and consistent in scale because it was copied from precisecontemporary surveys of the city of Rome, produced from cadastral records. Carvingmistakes and small irregularities remain in the original map. Its reproductionis made all the more difficult because of this lingering trace of the hand.

In the 1750s, a Europeanmapmaker cut a wooden map of the British Empire into pieces as an educationaltool for the children. In the 1990s, puzzle-making attained status as anaristocratic pastime.

I’m going to SpaceportAmerica.

Whatbecomes interesting, also, is how her sections of pieces, set more traditionallyinto the shapes of poems, suggest themselves as asides to the main narrative asvariations on the Greek Chorus, offering an alternate perspective on the mainaction, otherwise tethering together those elements of narrative.

You cant rely on
structure these folded
matchbooks I take one
greased packet of firesauce
This makes a very large
salsa verde, ten calories

The way you discovered
money, you pissed me off
when we touched, I sortof
peeled back, a paintstrip falling
from the pole. But wekeep
contact. I muscle myself
into a tight shirt, pressmy face
against a glass pane,make notes

Towards future health
wondering if the problemis lack
of calories or ritual
lack. Dry as a bone
and full of vacancies