This year, my favorite poetry books are not all books of poetry: there were too many books about poets, books of prose by poets, and other marginal cases I wanted to include.

“Prodigal: New and Selected Poems,” by Linda Gregerson. Gregerson’s syntax will make your heart stop. These are radiant poems about all manner of chance and misfortune. Gregerson makes us realize all the suffering adjacent to us in daily life.

“The Uses of the Body,” by Deborah Landau. Landau’s tart book about sex, the body, regret, and wonder picks up on all kinds of discredited tones, from light verse to showy confessionality.

“Supplication,” by John Wieners. Wieners was a careening, troubled soul, and these poems, many of them set in a dreary, vacated Boston, were like his private prayers. The poems steadied and encouraged him. The stakes in every poem are life and death.

“The Birth Mark,” by Susan Howe. Howe has been assembling, for years, a private American history made from ellipses, marginalia, scraps, discards, and erasures. This classic book of essays about the earliest American literature, first published in 1993, has just been reissued. There is so much savagery and power in the canon that Howe has almost single-handedly revived for American poets. If you read this book, you will then go looking for an old edition of Cotton Mather’s “Magnalia Christi Americana.”

“Chelsea Girls” and “I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems,” by Eileen Myles. Wow, is Myles having a moment. You can comb the Internet to find out all the reasons why you should read her. The poems are so vivid and up to date, you wonder if somebody you know is going to turn up in them. The novel-memoir, “Chelsea Girls,” is one of the best books about sex, drugs, beer, boredom, Boston, Chelsea, and the East Village that anybody’s ever going to write.

“James Merrill: Life and Art,” by Langdon Hammer. As fine as Richard Ellmann’s classic Yeats and Joyce biographies, and the best book published this year that had anything to do with poetry. Merrill wrote the greatest long poem in American literature, “The Changing Light at Sandover”—a supernatural epic that feels like an after-party for the real die-hards—over twenty-five years, in consultation with a Ouija Board. It’s all here: the childhood in Southampton and countless other posh locales, the lovers, the learning, the kimonos and willow-ware cups. Merrill’s art is bottomless. Hammer is the best imaginable guide.

“Voyage of the Sable Venus,” by Robin Coste-Lewis, especially the title poem. Something astounding: a long poem made from the collaged titles and descriptions of every work of art depicting the female black body in Western Art. All the effacements and contortions of art and art-designating institutions are unmasked. I kept thinking of Yeats’s line: “A terrible beauty is born."

“Breezeway,” by John Ashbery. A breezeway is a structure between structures; these poems are gorgeous, sad, and funny, providing a place to rest that is not a resting place. The best book in a decade by the greatest living American poet.

“Solarium,” by Jordan Zandi. A first book made eventful by the weirdness and clarity of Zandi’s mind. Poetry is like solitaire: we go to it to pass the time. Zandi reminds us that passing the time is a very serious activity. His balletic inner life belies the gravity at its core.

“On Elizabeth Bishop,” by Colm Toíbín. The Irish writer’s valentine to the Canadian-American poet: a beautiful meditation on shyness, sex, art, and family.

“How to Be Drawn,” by Terrance Hayes. Hayes’s poems aren’t classifiable. He’s an intellectual with the open soul of a child, a master of wordplay and formal gadgetry, as agile and resourceful a poet as any alive.