I have five poems up at Turntable & Blue Light: “39th Floor Aperture,” “Achilles,” “[G]olden Circe Sips Her Coffee,” “Zeppelin,” and “Purgatory”. These are all from my Impossible Gotham manuscript.
“39th Floor Aperture” is my homage to my day job at D. E. Shaw & Co., where I manage the Reception team (my receptionistas and receptioninjas). I’ve been there five years and logged many an hour behind the main reception desk. The space was designed by architect Steven Holl back in 1991-92 and occupies the top two floors of a skyscraper in Midtown, right off Times Square. It’s evidently a pretty famous space as I get requests from architecture students from all over the world to come visit. You can see the Statue of Liberty down off Manhattan to the south, and to the southwest, a perfect view of the New Year’s Eve Ball. Sometimes, if you look carefully out the west windows, down into Times Square, you can see the Naked Cowboy.
The publication of this poem is bittersweet timing as the company just consolidated into a new space across the street, so I no longer sit in this space day-in and day-out. Good-bye 39!
You can see professional photos of the space here. And my photos below:
People always ask whether there are green lights that illumine this cut-out; the entire backside of this wall is painted green, so it’s just natural light bouncing color.
“Looks more like an art gallery than a hedge fund.” Heard this quote more times than I can count.
That’s the desk where I worked.
And here are some shots showing the views from the floor:
Lady Liberty and the Times Square New Year’s Ball.
Midtown. And my boyfriend in our crazy auditorium space. I call it the vertigo room, induced by all those tiny squares…