Bare Soul is an award-winning poetry collection by Indian-American poet Kalpna Singh-Chitnis. At its heart, the book is a journey of self-inquiry and self-realization, exploring themes such as love, longing, suffering, impermanence, compassion, identity, and the mystery of being. Intimate yet universal, Bare Soul is a book about looking inward-into love, suffering, memory, consciousness, and the mystery of the self-and discovering what may be revealed through that search.
The collection includes poetic sequences such as Ancient Quest, Ancient Love, Ancient Remorse, River of Songs, Rain, Touched by the Devil, Conversations with a Friend, and Coming Home. Together, they form an inward journey through emotional and spiritual experience, drawing upon nature, memory, faith, mystery, and the elemental world.
More than a decade after its first publication, Bare Soul returns in its second edition with new materials, including an author foreword, "Bare Soul: A Self-Inquiry," along with selected critical responses, scholarly perspectives, and writings by poets, critics, and authors who have engaged with the collection over the years.
In 2017, Bare Soul received the Naji Naaman Literary Prize for Creativity in Lebanon. Poems from the collection have been translated into more than a dozen languages and published internationally, including Arabic translations by Nizar Sartawi published in literary magazines across the Arab world. The complete collection was translated into Ukrainian by poet and professor Ihor Pavlyuk and published in 2026 as "BARE SOUL: ОГОЛЕНА ДУША." The book has been studied academically, and selected poems from Bare Soul, archived in the Lunar Codex, have traveled to the Moon. The poetry film "River of Songs," based on poems from Bare Soul, directed by Kalpna Singh-Chitnis, is scheduled to travel on a separate Lunar Codex mission in November 2026.