David K. Leff, Essayist, Poet, Lecturer

New book from David Leff: Hidden in Plain Sight

Wesleyan University Press | 2012 | 260 pages
ISBN: 978-0-8195-7281-3 | ebook: 978-0-8195-7282-0 
Purchase on line or call: 800-421-1561

In the course of the mundane routines of life, we encounter a variety of landscapes and objects, either ignoring them or looking without interest at what appears to be just a tree, stone, anonymous building, or dirt road. But the deep traveler doesn’t make this mistake. Instead, the commonplace elements become the most important. By learning to see the magic in the mundane, we not only enrich daily life with a sense of place, we are more likely to protect and make those places better.  Join me on adventures discovering drive-in theaters, Quonset huts, old growth forests, cider mills, ghost towns, roadside springs, Nike missile sites, neglected graveyards and many other quirky wonders.  Hidden in Plain Sight explores my home turf of Connecticut, but the method of deep travel and the kinds of objects and phenomena awaiting discovery can be found anywhere.  You just have to look!  This book will teach you how.

Download the PDF overview sheet.

Depth of Field: Poems and Photographs

 Antrim House | 2010 | 96 pages | ISBN: 978-0-9843418-5-6 | Purchase

 Depth of Field reads unlike any other poetry book.  In his second collection, David K. Leff continues weaving together the inner and the outer spheres of life, connecting personal striving, loss, and wonderment with the worlds of nature, cultural currents, and our collective past.  But stepping beyond words, he links verbal and visual experience with poems joined to his own sometimes stunning, sometimes poignant photographs.  Words and pictures partner to tell parallel stories amplifying the reader’s encounter.

Deep Travel: In Thoreau's Wake on the Concord and Merrimack

University of Iowa Press | 2009 | 280 pages | ISBN: 1-58729-789-2 | Purchase

What is Deep Travel?

At its simplest, deep travel is about mindful looking, about journeys that drill deep into a place rather than demanding distance to be interesting. It's about experience heightened by connecting diverse natural and cultural phenomena often hidden in plain sight, about seeing in four dimensions, in time as well as space.  The deep traveler, for example, knows that the geology of a place is related to its ethnicity and architecture.

The ancients' restless eyes connected the dots in a night sky of chaotic stars and formed them into images and stories that captured the imagination and infused their world with meaning.  The deep traveler does the same with the landscape around him.  Deep travel is a methodology that will enrich a trip anywhere. 

The Price of Water

The Price of Water | Antrim House Books

2008 | 62 pages | ISBN: 978-0-9798451-9-X | Purchase

Antrim House is proud to present David K. Leff’s first collection of poetry, a group of prose poems whose moods and subjects run the gamut from delighted description of the natural world to lament for the loss of traditional ways in our man-made world. Leff asks, for instance, if flooding townships to create reservoirs may make water a bit pricey. These poems are informed by love of small town America and regret for all it has lost. By turns lyrical, angry, and philosophical, the poems are always elegant in language, accurate in observation, and passionate in point of view. They are prefaced with an eloquent defense of the prose poem as a means of bringing

The Last Undiscovered Place

The Last Undiscovered Place, The University of Virgina Press
2004 | 240 pages | ISBN 978-0-8139-2694-0 | Purchase

Where is the last undiscovered Place?

It's wherever you live because our immediate surroundings are the last spots we search for anything worthwhile or intriguing. David explores his home town, offering a metaphor and methodology for your own discovery of the place where you live.

What's been said about the book?

With warmth and a keen eye for the nuances of history and place, David  K. Leff offers this affectionate, insightful portrait of his adopted home of Collinsville, Connecticut, a village that looked perfectly ordinary until he fell prey to its rhythms and charm. The town taught him a new way of seeing his environment, and through this process he discovered what many Americans long for amid the suburban sprawl decried in James H. Kunstler's The Geography of Nowhere and many other recent books: a sense of community.