AVAILABLE now
"Talia’s book follows the cadence of the 21st-century dating scene—sensual scenes of love and lust sweep you up in reveries"
Jocelyne Gafner
Fear,
Love & Longing
reveals a coming-of-age through the lens of relationships, heartbreak, and betrayal. The collection of poems and musings explores how we discover some of the most intimate pieces of ourselves through romantic relationships, forcing us to introspect, find our voices, and come back to ourselves after the brokenness.
It examines recurring themes of the enmeshment and self-abandonment that often occur in romantic relationships. This piece highlights how these experiences are vehicles that catapult us into greater introspection, self-knowledge, and healing if we allow them.
Fear, Love & Longing is a raw, honest, and sometimes snarky erotic lament that details this journey through stylized vignettes of private moments and relationships from the first ten years of the author's love life.
Talia
Davis
"Fear Love & Longing is more than a work of writing, it’s a multi-sensorial experience"
Life & Relationship Coach | Author | Entrepreneur
As a child, Talia fell in love with language and writing. She found refuge within the blank pages of her journals and found that they provided a safe place to respond candidly to the world around her without consequence.
Talia is a dating and relationship coach. She is passionate about demystifying interpersonal relationship dynamics, especially between men and women, and is a lifelong student of family, love, and human sexual psychology.
As an undergrad student, Talia published a psychological study on race and perceived sexual availability and presented her research at the regional SWPA convention. She continued honing her creative and linguistic prowess as an actress, copywriter, and marketing professional for over a decade in Los Angeles.
She has been writing poetry and essays most of her life. Fear, Love & Longing is Talia's debut publishing of a personal creative work. Talia Davis currently resides in New York City, forever pursuing a life of creative adventures.
book
review
Jocelyne Gafner
As soon as you open Fear Love & Longing to the first page it is evident: this is more than a work of writing, it’s a multi-sensorial experience. Before I had time to read the first page of Talia Davis’s book, I was taken in by the design, the images—how everything was composed to support her words.
The poems and entries in this collection primarily explore relationships and the lessons that even the most painful and damaging relationships can offer. From those relationships and their rippling consequences, Talia explores what it's like to be a woman in today’s society, the (sometimes) ensuing depression, and what that depression looks like, pushed to its limits.
Moments of deep sorrowful reflection are cut through with passages that offer blunt comedic statements and show Talia’s range. Like the segue from Aurora into Accountability when Talia goes from wondering if you ever “envision yourself lying across asphalt roads-/ lifeless, suspended in time?” To observing, “Sometimes you’re insecure because your head is too far up your own ass.”
Talia’s criticism of herself is sharp, unforgiving. She has no interest in sugarcoating. And while Talia primarily reflects on herself for the first half of the book, she eventually turns her sights to the men who have hurt her and delivers such poignant phrases as “I’ve never heard such kind words with such sharp edges” in It’s definitely you.
Talia’s book follows the cadence of the 21st-century dating scene—sensual scenes of love and lust sweep you up in reveries, into the ecstatic realm of “what ifs,” only to turn the page and discover that it's possible that you just got played. I think most of us have felt the acute shame of deceit in the face of vulnerability, like in a particularly difficult heartbreak when Talia rawly admits, “being in love with you has been/ The single most humiliating experience of my life.”
Fear Love & Longing is a beautiful collection of thoughts, poems, and musings that follow a woman's journey learning the lessons that can only be learned through experience. Talia emerges triumphant, shaking off the detritus, but learning a lesson is never the end of the story. There is the forgetting and unlearning of other things and the work of sifting through all the learnings to find which will serve us best—Talia’s vulnerably offers up her experience of this process. Even though Talia touchingly likens her heart to jerky at the end, I still see the softness behind the scars. I can’t imagine she’ll ever lose that softness because, above all, this is a story of love and resilience and the interplay between the two.