Haunting the Black Air by Anthony Joseph (Bloomsbury, £12.99)
Joseph’s follow-up to the TS Eliot prize-winning Sonnets for Albert sees his poetic approach become more radical. He pays homage to avant garde writers such as Will Alexander and Nathaniel Mackey, while exploring “Nostalgia, mostly grief, / a haunting sound – / the frequency of some / magnetic feeling.” That makes for challenging syntax on first reading the poems. Persist, and Joseph’s unabashed lyricism shines through, finding beauty on dancefloors, city streets and in Trinidadian landscapes: “the way music fills the room, how we embrace until / we become flare bright, light as the white refraction / of the sun upon the summit of hills.”

Selected Poems by Leontia Flynn (Carcanet, £14.99)
She was a Next Generation poet and Forward prize winner; it’s a shock to remember that Flynn has been publishing for more than 20 years, so fresh do her poems remain. This assembly is a glorious reintroduction to her mordant wit, imaginative image-making and unerring ability to puncture pretension. Letter to Friends from 2011 is a brilliant, Auden-esque dissection of the early 21st century, worth a library of political analyses: “daily threats brought to our Way of Life / by man-made imminent apocalypse / though neither really outweighs private grief”. There are pleasures on every page.

You Must Live: New Poetry from Palestine edited by Jorie Graham; translated by Tayseer Abu Odeh & Sherah Bloor (Penguin, £12.99)
Featuring more than 30 poets living in Gaza and the West Bank, with work written in the last few years, these poems testify to the resilience of the artists, and the role that poetry still has to give voice and bear witness in times of crisis. Unsurprisingly, there’s a taut urgency throughout: “who knows how we’ll exit love. / Will it be on foot, will it be in a shroud?” as Hamid Ashour puts it. There’s joy and humour too, even if the latter is pitch black, Khaled Juma’s gravedigger exchanging shovel for excavator: “I have built a business with death. / Now we are first on the stock exchange. / Second to none.”

Melete by Jennifer Lee Tsai (Bloodaxe, £14)
Lee Tsai’s debut is a sprawling mix of poetry and prose exploring second-generation Chinese identity in the UK: “She cannot fully know her mother tongue / but she can speak the language / of the coloniser.” The book feels roughly hewn, fiercely articulating the need to write: “She wants to empty the contents of her mind upon the page / and create something beautiful.” In exploring “the splitting of myself into two halves”, and showing the ambivalences in making sense of it, Lee Tsai has made a landmark work about the British south-east Asian experience.

Sparrow on the Rooftop by Rachel Long (Chatto & Windus, £12.99)
The playfulness in My Darling from the Lions, Long’s debut, has been replaced in this second collection by a directness of diction and image. Repeatedly the poems, ranging across alcoholism, eating disorders and the grief triggered by the end of a relationship, pull you up with their unflinching gaze, such as in Sad Shower, after a work by Tracey Emin: “Now you are entirely / hungry, a rib on the pavement.” Long’s lightness of touch means the pain isn’t overwhelming. Instead, she converts it into recovery: “that living- / room dancing might make it better; / and by increments, it does”.

Somebody Should Have Pressed Record by Galia Admoni (Strange Region, £13)
How might you react to feeling lonely? Perhaps start a relationship with an imaginary version of Brassic actor Joseph Gilgun? That’s the premise behind Admoni’s narrative poem, where the central character is haunted by “Joe”, part unreliable friend, part life coach: “Careful. They’ll start giving you targeted ads for therapy.” Admoni’s tone is reminiscent of Georges Perec, both in its jabs at contemporary living and in what it reveals about the difficulties we have in making sense of ourselves in the absence of others: “Try saying ‘I love you’ in the mirror. / Your reflection says nothing.” The conceit, and book, is a delight.

• Rishi Dastidar’s latest collection is Cherry Blossom at Nightbreak (Nine Arches)