It Must be a Misunderstanding: New and Selected Poems by Coral Bracho, translated by Forrest Gander (Carcanet, £15.99)
The influential Mexican poet turned 70 last year, and this generous introduction to her work is beautifully translated by Forrest Gander, himself a leading US poet. When the second poem begins, “Time will open out / like an inflatable boat / on the shore / of a dark river,” we relax into a slower, deeper pace of thought. There’s also a sense of deep play: “Right in the middle of what I want to say / there’s a long row of chairs.” Yet when this image turns out to be conjuring the confusions of terminal illness, we switch from picturing kindergartens to clinic waiting rooms – and experience ourselves doing so. Bracho’s consistently unusual images are profoundly illuminating, and her especial gift is to bend them to make us think. She can be both metaphysical and full of human emotion – often, the two at once. “Only love offers us the dimension of the real / its dark force /curving.”

Imperium by Jay Gao (Carcanet, £11.99)
The first full collection by the young Chinese-Scottish poet introduces a prodigiously assured and gifted new voice. Gao is searchingly intelligent across an exceptionally wide range of material. This includes bereavement, the natural world, classical myth, US veteran’s trauma and living a hyphenated identity in a post-colonial world – examined, in the poem Hostis, through the image of a mosquito trapped in cling film in an inflight meal. Imperium doesn’t simply namecheck ideas and experiences, but explores them, with vital and disconcerting results. Not Unequal to Many moves with rapid grace from observation of nature to an evocation of classical Greek priests scrying entrails: “those suited egrets waited by the stream for their / sweetbreads / like a map each new world opens with a knife to the body”. This rich hinterland of knowledge is never fusty, always alive, even in the beautiful Body Sonnet, fractured by grief and haunted by “the breath of those / inert evenings … / hospital windows from the last night ever”.

The Illustrated Woman by Helen Mort (Chatto & Windus, £12.99)
The punning title of Mort’s third collection encapsulates her theme. Women are objects of the male gaze; but tattooing covers the body itself with illustrations. In this way, according to the title series, tattooing reclaims female autonomy. The remainder of the opening sections are taken up with sequences describing breast augmentation, motherhood and the poet’s young son. This is verse that impeccably deploys the extended metaphors and rhythmic conventions that writing workshop culture approves. Pip juxtaposes the orange groves of Córdoba with a hoped-for pregnancy, “tiny as an orange seed / a burrowed pip, near-weightless, citrusy”. Though this writing also “illustrates” the woman of the book’s title, such unrelieved contemplation of the poet’s body can feel claustrophobic. So the charge of real feeling in the book’s third section comes as a paradoxical relief. Here Mort explores parental mortality, and her experience as a victim of deepfake pornography.

The Arctic by Don Paterson (Faber £14.99)
This is poetry of loss: of relationships, of a father, through midlife crisis, and even, in premonitions of nuclear winter, loss of the world. But this being Paterson, the book also glitters with wit, from that hyperbolic title to its complex web of homages. Spring Letter brilliantly adopts “MacNeice’s ragged antiphon / with its drunk and disorderly rhymes”, from his cusp-of-war Autumn Journal, to rage against Russian expansionism. The God Abandons Antony, translating Constantine Cavafy’s evocation of a lost prime, is utterly immediate. Cavafy’s setting, Alexandria, cues another instalment of Paterson’s own series extending from book to book, The Alexandrian Library, this one viewing “Citizen Science” through digital lenses. Urgently contemporary, this dense and serious collection also glitters with exactitude. Only such an immaculate writer could calibrate the toughness in “I am not me. I am the one / who walks unseen beside me”, or the redemptiveness of August which “held us in its blaze / the spirals turning slow as galaxies”.

12 Pamphlets by Selima Hill (Fair Acre Press, £7.50 each)
This year, Fair Acre Press are issuing a dozen pamphlets by Selima Hill, for decades a cult classic of the poetry world. In fact Hill should be loaded with international honours like her fellow surreal expressionist, the great Tomaž Šalamun. The characteristically laconic titles include The Fly, Susan, and Men in Shorts. In them this “daughter of a mother / it’s too late / to say I’m sorry to / for being me” is now adventuring fiercely towards older age, a territory with black humour to match her own. Still, there’s plenty of room for characteristic family analysis and for childhoods as grotesque as anything painted by Paula Rego. “Cousins”, for example, “Squeak like chalk and wear each other’s everything / and when they get together, they squirm.” Fantastical and readable in equal measure, this extraordinary poetry is too often sidestepped as unclassifiable. We should relax, and admire its formal and emotional virtuosity.

• Fiona Sampson’s Starlight Wood: Walking Back to the Romantic Countryside (Little, Brown) is published in September.