‘Precise, sensual and heady, like the burn of skin when someone first touches you.’
— Anahit Behrooz, author of BFFs: The Radical Potential of Female Friendship

Join Hajar Press, Sophie Chauhan and Amardeep Singh Dhillon at Reference Point in London to celebrate the publication of Curious Affinities, a collection of rousing poetry and incisive prose which reflects on the bonds and boundaries that govern our collective ways of life.

How much distance and difference can intimacy hold? How much proximity and likeness does it require? What can we learn from its capacities? And what could we salvage from its limits?

Chauhan unravels the risks and possibilities brought forth by unconventional styles of intimacy. Across kinship, friendship, romance and community, the threads of social relation are entangled by race, class and queerness in unexpected and generative ways, as we find ourselves rent to shreds and stitched back together in the name of common feelings.

‘Affinities happen where boundaries meet. With the touching of two exteriors, the promise of transgression and its fierce impossibility come to agonise, tumble and embrace one another.’

Sophie Chauhan is a London-based writer and researcher, born in the UK and raised in Naarm (Melbourne). She is completing a PhD in Race, Ethnicity and Postcolonial Studies at University College London. Her academic, creative and organising work converges around her interest in anti-capitalist, queer and decolonial approaches to radical coalition-building.

Amardeep Singh Dhillon is a writer and co-editor at Red Pepper Magazine, whose work has been featured in prominent outlets such as The Independent, Novara Media and Vice. They are the programme coordinator at The World Transformed and an organiser with both the South London Bartenders Network and Lesbian and Gays Support the Migrants.

Hajar Press is an independent and proudly political publishing house run by and for people of colour.

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