Let go,

Let go …

I tell myself,

Submerged under the water. (Ancient Remorse).

Following the international success of Love Letters to Ukraine from Uyava: Любовні листи до України від Уяви—recipient of the prestigious Hryhorii Kochur Award, an honor conferred by the State of Ukraine and a 2024 International Book Awards Finalist; this Ukrainian / English collection by internationally regarded poet Kalpna Singh-Chitnis is an achievement in a literary sense, for its multi-linguistic ability to speak in two languages simultaneously through the fluid translation of respected scholar and translator, Ihor Pavlyuk, (Ігор Павлюк) a highly gifted poet himself and the People’s Poet of Ukraine and English PEN Award laureate.

Bare Soul (Оголена Душа) does not seek to directly address Ukraine, although you can pick up on the author’s ongoing support of the people of Ukraine, through her passionate long-standing advocacy. It is primarily a collection presented side by side in English and Ukrainian, inviting readers across languages and cultures to encounter poetry as a shared act of listening, witnessing, and transformation. A collection of extraordinary beauty and moving passages, alongside luminous, image-driven language, where Singh-Chitnis’s poems consider the natural world and the unending desire to explore humanities contradictions. As others have said of Bare Soul, it is, “a philosophical reflection to create a meditative space where personal experience meets the universal.” Rooted in lyric introspection, Bare Soul draws on elemental imagery and philosophical reflection, to create an ultimately meditative space, merging personal experience with the universal wonder of existence:

After a long time,
Silences have found their meanings
Not spoken in words,
But only to be written
By our hands
On the forehead of time. (Ancient Love)

Singh-Chitnis, often referred to as; ‘one of India’s most revered and gifted living poets,’ winner of the coveted; Bihar Rajbhasha Award, in India and the Bihar Shri, for her contributions to literature, has rejected modern artifice and written through her own unmasked being as totem for all humanities frailty, in her intensely relevant, yet at times deeply personal collection, Bare Soul. Often, her poems create episodic mutualistic patterns that feel sequential, to depict the poet’s shifting moods in response to life, with questions we have all asked, repeated like mantra:

Weighting the sky all night

With my arms up,

Whom do I summon?

What do I desire? (Touched by the Devil)

Emotive, truth-infused poetry that ruminates over the seemingly ordinary and oft metaphysical elements of existence, alongside a heady passion for the natural world. This poet’s language exhibits sheer loveliness in her choice of wordplay to address the contradictions of human suffering and the unerring longing for love. She does so without pastiche or loss of originality, often as if emotions we all feel were being written about for the first time. In her candor, the poet finds self-realization through the literal baring of her soul, where imagery and metaphor transport readers kaleidoscopically through the natural world.

I just watched the pollen fall from the pepper tree

Turning me yellow and scented, like the earth. (A Pale Monday Morning)

Every time I read a Kalpna Singh-Chitnis poem, I am transported to the heart of a world I am half-familiar with, wherein the poet connects deeply and proffers what she finds to her us, her humble readers. This trance-like quality of writing is particularly unusual, it enters your spirit like a dream-state and moves you in unexpected ways for the purity of its intention to spread insight and hopefulness. Profoundly Buddhist, I am continually amazed at the ability this poet has, for reaching the reader and leaving such a deep imprint with passages like:

We unknowingly reach into other’s hearts,
Only to create ripples. Sometimes,
Ripples aren’t bad, and it’s okay to feel sad,
To understand the heart of a pond,
Filled with sorrows. (A Pale Monday Morning)

It would not be accurate to characterize Singh-Chitnis’s poems as ever succumbing to maudlin pessimism. Rather, they negate life’s unpredictability, without seeking to escape it. Whilst deeply rooted in her Buddhist center, the honesty therein, reveals Singh-Chitnis’s awareness in her consciousness in relation to the universal suffering around her.  Bare Soul emerges as a work of spiritual inquiry through its rivers of lyrical intensity, engaging directly with notions of selfhood and spiritual transcendence. This bilingual edition unites, in Ukrainian and English, a shared contemplative space. Through this brand of poetic-compassion, Singh-Chitnis channels and transforms our awareness of suffering and exhaustion, into hopefulness, such as her poem Ancient Quest, where she shape-shifts the idea of our soul being a kind of universal safety:

Welcome to the humble abode of my soul,
that longs to hear your footfalls,
and hold you in my arms,
for eternity…!

As someone who reads poetry for a living and thus reads it frequently, it takes a lot to truly impress me, or stay with me, because so much poetry is well intentioned but doesn’t have lasting power or a universalist conscience. This poet has that kind of voice, the kind you can’t just learn to become, you have to grow into through hard spiritual enquiry of oneself. It is an evolving, yet knowing voice that stands out from the crowd, in its unabashed beauty and honest reflection of a flawed world. Anyone who reads Kalpna Singh-Chitnis will remember what she wrote, because that’s exactly what she wants, for you to consider the world around you, rather than remain blinded by distraction.

I belong to a world where you can’t soar,
And, I too, cannot fly. (Devil’s Dilemma)

The observations here are acute, pure and flowing, in their evocation of struggle. They provide hope alongside the honest observation of atrocity and inequity; they are both passionate activist and gentle Zen. The reflections are deep, able to penetrate lazy thinking and shake us awake to the necessity for change. Ultimately Kalpna Singh-Chitnis focuses on love and its ability to heal. The redemptive and soulful ripples of her poetry are breathtakingly necessary and assess our most profound emotions in our ancient search for something meaningful and more than ourselves:

Escaping the black holes of fear,
I try to reach you
In your dark heavens,
Seeking mutual salvation.
Not scared of the past,
Not scared of the future, (Ancient Remorse).

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Kalpna Singh-Chitnis is an Indian-American poet, filmmaker, and author of six poetry collections, including ‘Love Letters to Ukraine from Uyava’ (River Paw Press), a finalist at the 2023 International Book Awards; Trespassing My Ancestral Lands (2024, Finishing Line Press); and Bare Soul, the recipient of the 2017 Naji Naaman Literary Prize.  Her works have appeared in World Literature Today, Columbia Journal, The Los Angeles Review, Poetry International, Tupelo Quarterly, The Colorado Review, The Laurel Review, Vsesvit, Silk Routes (IWP) at the University of Iowa, and Stanford University’s Life in Quarantine.

Kalpna’s poems have been translated into 21 languages including Ukrainian, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Albanian, Czech, Arabic, Nepali and Urdu. She has appeared on ABC, Voice of America, Fox News, India’s National TV Network Doordarshan, and the radio. Kalpna Singh-Chitnis is the recipient of the Bihar Rajbhasha Parishad Award and she has read at the International Literature Festival, Berlin, Sahitya Akademi—India’s highest academy of letters, Poets & Writers, AWP Conferences, among others. Kalpna’s poems and her poetry film River of Songs, included in the Lunar Codex, traveled to the Moon’s south pole with NASA-SpaceX-Intuitive Machine missions in 2024. Kalpna Singh Chitnis is a former lecturer of Political Science and Editor-in-Chief of Life and Legends, she is an Advocacy Member at the United Nations Association (USA) and works as an independent filmmaker in Hollywood.

Esteemed translator Ihor Pavlyuk is a Ukrainian writer, translator and research worker. Named People’s Poet of Ukraine in 2020. Being awarded the Honored Worker of Arts of Ukraine (2026). He is the winner of a 2013 English PEN Award and the winner of the Switzerland Literary Prize 2021. He also holds a doctorate in Social Communication, professor.