After binge-reading “Best American Poetry” volumes earlier this year, I vowed never again to open one of my columns with hand-wringing over the meaning of “best,” a word that troubled that series’ editors much more than either “American” or “poetry.” I used to want to distance myself from it too, what Louise Glück called “the tyranny of taste making.” I’ve been writing these lists for The Times for five years now; I trust my readers know that all “best” really means in the world of the arts is what certain people like.

Salvage

by Hedgie Choi

Some of the poems that most struck me this year evince a certain cruelty. Take the first lines of Choi’s poem “Freaking Out”: “I know other people are real, don’t/remind me.” I myself have uttered the words “Other people are real,” so this felt like a direct confrontation. I laughed out loud many times reading “Salvage,” Choi’s delightfully spiteful debut — more like savage!

Choi’s voice has the defiant confidence of youth, which we all need exposure to. The poems are a little bit insulting (“Couldn’t it well be, though, that much/like the kingdom of heaven, imagery/is for losers and sickos?”) in the most appealing way, like an argument that actually changes your mind. “Is it important to know facts?” the poem “Phases” asks; “Because I am starting to think/maybe not.” Poems can only hurt me a little, and their cruelty can feel so true: “In the end,/I am/a wholly serious/person./But we are not in the end yet.”

I Do Know Some Things

by Richard Siken

This was another book that gave me almost masochistic pleasure. In a formal departure from Siken’s “War of the Foxes” (2015) and his influential debut, “Crush” (2005), these poems are in prose. All 77 (the number a homage, I take it, to Berryman’s “77 Dream Songs”) were written after and about Siken’s stroke, and constitute a brief autobiography: “It’s a small window, the span of time in which we get to say what we know.”

This is brutal work, sometimes frightening in its handling of aging and death — life as damage — and the struggle to recover one’s body, mind and self after crisis. Siken is also interrogating selfhood as a long artful project, a mode of defense, an act of deceit: “I told a lie and it turned into a fact.” The word happen figures as a chilling understatement; what happens may shatter your life: “It was clear that something had happened that wasn’t going to unhappen” (“Sidewalk”). “I’m waiting for him to tell me that it isn’t going to happen again. He isn’t saying it” (“Heat Map”). “You have to be careful, things want to happen” (“Devonian Forest”).

This book can be bleak, but also magical (“Below the bed the floor, the earth, then out the other side and stars. I fell in all directions”) and funny in a Glückian way — a one-syllable laugh in the devil’s face. “If it’s any consolation,” he writes, “I’ll never forgive you.”

Bloodmercy

by I.S. Jones

Reinterpreting Cain and Abel as sisters, the poems in this very impressive debut have the fearsome, violent, musical force of myth. “Most pain is useless,” Jones writes in the opening poem, “but it’s the body’s oldest song.” As a series they form a sustained engagement with the idea of power — power we succumb to and power we claim — and triangulate a kind of hybrid space both real and allegorical, in a time both present and eternal-past. “Once I was myth, now I am a girl,” she writes in “Cain.” And in “Eve Onto Lilith”: “He breaks/heaven over my skull & the world goes dark. Sister, it goes on like this./ … /Days uncount themselves.”

An incredible coherence is achieved in part by echoing motifs of blood, blades, sacrificial goats and the sun: “I am the axe dreaming my way through Adam’s throat.” In “A Brief History of the World According to Goats,” Jones writes: “Goats are born with panoramic vision to see death/Goats plan for war as does any animal/This is a poem about rot.” And in the remarkable ending of “Nocturne”: “Making real the dream of my suffering/the sun drags its headless body across the sky like a monument/of war.”

Gaza: The Poem Said Its Piece

by Nasser Rabah

The translators of “Gaza,” which contains selected poems by the Palestinian poet Rabah, comment in an afterword on the difficulties of bringing these poems into “the very language — American English — that plays a role in enabling so many of the distortions in how Palestine is depicted on the world stage.” They sought not to “overtranslate,” to allow for some awkwardness, “ambiguity and even non-understanding.” This produces lines that are sometimes syntactically disorienting, but displacement and estrangement are at home in these dreamlike surreal zones where horror and destruction come up against beauty, music and sex, where quotidian routine and boredom exist alongside the maddening and unthinkable.

While sound may not always translate, image does, and Rabah’s work is full of indelible images: “I am no soldier, but/during the war I see myself a balcony hanging in the sky/after they kill the building … I’m no soldier, but I see myself during the war arranging the/scene of the last death, to please with my death the living.” In the long poem “What I Didn’t Say to Me,” Rabah writes: “Be boring/ … /Be Tom Hanks and say: God! Everything is great, guys. Be/anything, just wave back to your beautiful death in the mirror.” (Tom Hanks!) “For once, just be orange, O sea, and you, heaven, rain just/once in your own direction.”

The Minotaur’s Daughter

by Eva Luka

Sometimes after only one or two lines you know a poet speaks to you — as if the sensibility comes through in the smallest units. This was my experience with Luka and “The Minotaur’s Daughter,” translated from the Slovak by James Sutherland-Smith. I love these witchy poems about liminal spaces and hybrid creatures, man-beasts and fish-birds and dead-alive beings: “Dressed-undressed,/in her mouth crying and singing,/she returns down the slope/to home-not-home,” Luka writes in “Wildsister.” “Neither on foot nor in a wagon,/on her shoulder an owl, in her hand/an apple, in her apple/love, in her love/poison.”

I’m especially drawn to the series of poems based on Leonora Carrington’s paintings, such as “Portrait of the Late Mrs. Partridge” (“This woman looks like the embodiment of lightning”) and “My Step-Sister’s Hen”: “But now is a moment of defiance. The hen bares her teeth/ … /Just wait, says the hen./One day you will be in a collar, as happens between owners/and the owned. One day we will switch roles.” Here is a book alive with the darkness of Old World fairy tales.

Tantrums in Air

by Emily Skillings

On the basis of her second collection, “Tantrums in Air,” I’m pinning Skillings as a fellow hole girl — we who love to aestheticize the void. Of “the carrot flower, or Queen Anne’s lace,” Skillings writes in one poem: “I love it when they are as large/and white as a china saucer./The period in the middle./A little centering gesture./A sip of dark, a hole/into which slips all/the sky’s embroidery.”

Reminiscent of the school of “Gurlesque” (Arielle Greenberg’s term for the “feminist incorporating of the grotesque and cruel with the spangled and dreamy”), Skillings’s poems read a bit like absurdist theater set in a haunted dollhouse. An idea she borrows from Eileen Myles — that poets aren’t smart, but “something else” — recurs throughout in the form of insistence on an outsider kind of intelligence, a via negativa: “half thinking, half nothing.”

The final poem, with lines so long it’s printed sideways, is mesmerizing: “Oh, you’ve noticed the mice, don’t mind them/ … /I’m starting to think they widen the holes between things: words, days./ … /This is only one room in a vast conspiracy of space.”