Dante’s Inferno by Lorna Goodison (Carcanet, £16.99)
More than 20 years in the making, this career-defining version begins: “Halfway tree. The journey of our life found me / there at midnight in a ramshackle state.” Goodison superimposes her beloved Jamaica on to Dante’s hell, evoking her country and the wider Caribbean region transformed by colonialism, Christianity and natural disasters. Goodison’s Virgil is fearless Miss Lou, the Jamaican poet and performer Louise Bennett-Coverley, who speaks in vivid Caribbean vernacular. Punchy and mission-driven, she is an ingenious invention gifted with unforgettable lines: “Art is Almighty God grandpickney”; “I never stop defend wi language. / I train at RADA; fi mi stage was the whole world.” Goodison teases out the tender interdependency between Miss Lou and the poet without downplaying the tricky power dynamics. Structurally faithful to the original, comparable in scale and inventiveness to Derek Walcott’s Omeros, this is an expert recasting for a different time, place and people: an epoch-making poem.

Wellwater by Karen Solie (Picador, £12.99)
Solie’s new collection ushers us into a world of corporate herbicides and devastating fires, though beauty can still be observed in unlikely places: a basement, snowplow, horseshoe or flashlight. With forensic attentiveness, her poems document “the chemical … wedded to the seed” and “the kingdom of grass … wild, false, tufted, and procumbent”. Her expansive, talkative lines unpack tight domestic spaces jam-packed with childhood memories as well as the awesome vistas of vast, dust-filled Canadian landscapes. Sometimes didactic and anecdotal, always matter-of-fact, Solie is a philosophical conversationalist: “With knowledge comes / that duty. Pain, mostly, and the relief from pain. / Duty performed willingly feels like kindness / to its recipients, kindness withheld like cruelty.” This is a well-timed book addressing our moment of climatic turbulence.

Chaotic Good by Isabelle Baafi (Faber, £12.99)
Neatly structured in five sections – separation, childhood, adolescence, marriage and rebirth – Chaotic Good is a lesson in pain management: “Every day I lost a pain, but you / gave me another to take its place.” For Baafi, pain, however scarring, is a teacher, and poetry is an effective pathway for self-growth, a “modality” that helps redefine stigma and trauma: “When I return to the poem it is much changed – / harsher. It won’t answer to its name.” Many forms of anger appear in the book, addressing fatherlessness, school bullying, racism and sexism. Baafi’s speakers hold on to anger as a source of self-determination: “I burned all the bridges beneath my feet / and was so fly I didn’t even get wet.” Although it could be more nuanced and condensed, this well-organised debut offers a fierce critique of a toxic marriage and a redemptive vision through poetry.

Find Me As the Creature I Am by Emily Jungmin Yoon (Atlantic, £10.99)
There is an unfiltered, confident sense of sincerity in Yoon’s poetry, as when the opening poem uses a horse as a metaphor for feelings: “Imagine love as a horse … standing and pacing, tamed and watching.” Yoon’s poetry is full of explanations: “to love someone means to imagine / their death”; “affection means both / fondness and disease.” The word “mean” recurs throughout, as Yoon’s speakers insist on poetry as primarily pedagogic, autobiographical and upbeat: “I want my life to be / a poem. The future of a poem is mystery. / Writing toward uncertainty, I locate beauty. / In this process I harvest joy.” The collection seeks to explore the intergenerational bond between grandmother, mother and daughter, and its longest poem, I Leave Asia and Become Asian, overflows with statements on racism, home, belonging and identity, as the speaker announces that “I am now simultaneously more than and less than Korean”. Yoon’s explicit and overinterpretative lines have created a tightly confessional book that feels confined and limited.

Ecstasy by Alex Dimitrov (Jonathan Cape, £15.99)
From The Bacchae to Rimbaud to Allen Ginsberg, there has been no shortage of poetry about sex, drugs, parties and God. Ecstasy stands out for its brutal examination of the transience of Eros: “At the end of ecstasy / only the memory of ecstasy.” Dimitrov’s nostalgic lyrics are campy and fun: “I don’t care about being remembered. / I care about a great glass of wine. / Strong men. Beautiful sentences. Italian leather.” His sexy, gossipy, sarcastic speakers take poppers, use Grindr and travel to Paris and the Maldives. There is wit and candour both on and beneath the surface: “The job of a poet / is to chase a feeling. / The job of a poet today / has become kissing ass. / And I never liked ass. / I’m more of a dick guy, / actually.” Although the short-chipped lines sometimes fall flat, Dimitrov is disarmingly self-aware, observing tartly that “Poetry / is not a self-help book”.

• Kit Fan’s latest poetry collection is The Ink Cloud Reader (Carcanet).