Pascale Petit’s poetry collection Mama Amazonica, which merges the Amazon rainforest with the psychiatric ward caring for her mentally ill mother, has won the RSL Ondaatje prize for books that best “evoke the spirit of a place”.

Petit’s seventh collection tells the story of her mother, exploring the consequences of abuse as she transforms into a series of creatures – a hummingbird, a wolverine, a “jaguar girl”. Petit, who dedicated the book to her troubled parent, writes: “She’s a rainforest / in a straitjacket,” And: “My mother, trying to conceal / her lithium tremor // as she carries the Amazon / on her back, // her rosettes of rivers / and oxbow lakes, // her clouds of chattering caciques, / her flocks of archangels.”

Born in Paris, Petit now lives in Cornwall and has been shortlisted for the TS Eliot prize for poetry four times. Ondaatje prize judge and writer Eva Hoffman said that “the Amazon rainforest comes vividly alive” in Petit’s poems, “with human characters as much a part of nature as the creatures and plants living there – alluring and frightening, violent and vulnerable, dangerous and endangered”.

“A feat of imaginative intensity, this is also an act of reckoning and reparation, in which deep empathy for a disturbed mother is transmuted into the exacting beauty of poetic language,” said Hoffman.

Hoffman’s fellow judge Tahmima Anam called Mama Amazonica an unforgettable book. “Rich with metaphor, the poems explode on the page with the multiple narratives of motherhood, illness, pain, and redemption. All of this set in a rainforest that is both mythic and vividly alive. This is a book that feels almost magical in its unlikeliness, and that for me is what made it a clear winner,” said Anam.

Titles including Fiona Mozley’s Booker-shortlisted novel Elmet and Xiaolu Guo’s memoir Once Upon a Time in the East had also been in the running for the £10,000 prize, which is open to fiction, non-fiction and poetry that evoke the spirit of a location anywhere in the world.

Previous winners include James Meek’s Russia-set novel The People’s Act of Love, and Edmund de Waal’s memoir The Hare With Amber Eyes, about his ancestors the Ephrussi family, who lived in Odessa, Vienna and Paris.