PART of a loose trilogy, Julian Fuks’s second novel Occupation (Charco Press, £9.99), follows his highly acclaimed 2015 book Resistance.

Skilfully translated by Daniel Hahn, his latest quasi-autobiographical work is a meditation on fatherhood, refugees and death. In it, the Brazilian author intertwines three separate accounts of refugees occupying a derelict building in downtown Sao Paulo, the story of the author’s psychoanalyst father dying from lung cancer and his wife’s pregnancy.

It takes some time for these narrative strands to complement each other and, when they do, the author creates a landscape that is as devastatingly personal as it is highly political, shedding light on contemporary life in Brazil under the right-wing administration of Jair Bolsonaro.

It’s a powerful and important addition to Fuks’s oeuvre.

Susana Thenon’s Ova Completa (Ugly Duckling Press, £12) was originally published in 1987, only five years after the bloody military dictatorship that devastated Argentina, and it is a seminal work of poetry that has inspired many generations of poets in that country.

Now available in English, it is a complex, multilayered and interlingual work from one of the key Argentinean poets of the 1960s generation which included Alejandra Pizarnik and Juana Bignozzi among others.

The collection’s title brings to the surface the many ambiguities of language and meaning so evident in much of Thenon’s work — “ova” is related to a woman’s eggs, in contrast with “obra completa” as in “complete works.”

This outstanding bilingual book touches on many important themes of the time, still current today. They range from feminism and gender violence to the Falklands War, classical and popular culture, the “vulgar” register, the artificiality of language and the heritage of patriarchy and colonialism.

“Why is that woman screaming?/why is she screaming?/why is that woman screaming?/don’t even try to understand.” So begins Thenon’s highly experimental masterpiece in a poetical voice that defies conventions and subverts genres. It plays with meaning, gender roles and context, as in her poem The Funds of the Treasury: “struss/one of the great evils/that affect womanity/before it was called stress/and before that strass/or Strauss/it’s like a stumbling waltz/for the woman without a shadow/there is no drama/she’s drunk/drunk the pig/struss.”

Translating such a complex poetical work is almost an impossible task, yet Rebekah Sith accomplishes it with dexterity, care and love and the collection gains hugely from two illuminating essays from poet and educator Maria Negroni as well as from the translator herself.

A must-read for those interested in discovering one of the most intriguing and fascinating poetical voices from the latter part of the 20th century in Argentina.

Mexica Mix (Verve Poetry Press, £7.50) is Marina Sanchez’s second poetry pamphlet, with 25 poems divided into three sections: Family, Icons and Earth.

Sanchez is most successful when she explores her rich family ancestry — Spanish, Native American and British — as in the opening poem For My Father Each Time He Crossed the Pyrenees.

In it, she tells the painful story of her emigre Spanish father as he crisscrosses the border again and again to France during the Spanish Civil War in the winter of 1939 before moving to Mexico: “Though he’s been gone many years,/I still wish he’d had to cross only once,/to avoid the grief of the emigrante./Instead the load grew heavier,/until his heart could bear no more.”

In Clouds of Doubt, Sanchez uncovers uncomfortable truths about her mother: “Other times, she’d say we came from Mixtecs./But she looked down on ‘indios’ and ‘prietos’,/only pointing out her skin colour/to boast how she turned chocolate in the sun” and she concludes the poem with: “My ancestors lie like bud bursts in these tales.”

Though I wish Mexica Mix had taken perhaps more risks, not only formally but also thematically — especially when exploring the complex Mexican indigenous experiences and traditions — it nevertheless shows Sanchez's great passion and dedication to her main themes of displacement, bilingual identity and filial love.