In his book “Memoir: An Introduction,” from 2011, the scholar G. Thomas Couser argues that we go to the genre not so much for detail or style as for “wisdom and self-knowledge,” for what the main character, who is always the author, has learned. Sometimes, though, the style is the lesson. Earlier this year, the Seattle poet Paul Hunter published “Clownery,” which follows Hunter from his birth in the rural Midwest, through college, marriage, fatherhood, divorce, high-school and college teaching, grease- and gear-filled shirtsleeve jobs, caregiving for an ill sister and playing with grandchildren. The chapters conclude with Hunter’s late-life meditations, “trying to keep from a lip-smacking bitterness” as he imagines “the end of the planet as a hospitable home.” Hunter published his first chapbook in 1970, and has been giving us verse about rural and wild America, and practical prose about sustainable farming, every few years since 2000. In “Clownery,” rather than using “I” or “me,” or naming any characters, Hunter tells his own story as that of a nameless “clown.”

This simple device has astonishing effects, making Hunter’s life at once more generic—it’s easier to see yourself in “the clown” than in “Paul Hunter”—and funnier and sadder. “One morning out in the country the little clown’s mother was washing her mother’s hair in the kitchen pantry, behind the curtain where they boiled their water and took their washtub baths,” he writes. And later: “The clown knew nothing of planning, and snagged on a nail ripped his pants. Got caught and stayed caught till he was practically naked.” The floppy-shoes aspects of puberty and old age, when we may feel at once too big and too small, too late and too early, fit the conceit almost too easily: “Aging for clowns was more of a ripening that just went on and on. . . . Clowns were born weepy with blubber lips anyhow, and pratfalls demanded lifelong practice,” Hunter writes. “Clowns were always at an awkward stage,” “hiding twitchy flat feet . . . in big shoes.” Sentence by sentence, he manages to sound like a rambling talker, a corn-fed storyteller, even though, each time you finish a page or a chapter, you realize just how elegantly assembled the volume is.

Hunter’s unusual autobiography is one of a few recent books that reinvent, or fracture, the memoir’s form. All come from small presses; all come long after the stylish, formally inventive, and popular books of the late-nineties memoir boom (Dave Eggers’s “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,” for example, and Lauren Slater’s “Lying”). Popular memoirs these days are more direct: it’s generally easy to say what makes the lives they chronicle stand out, so that readers and critics focus on their subjects, whether it’s Appalachia (J. D. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy”), weight, shame, and trauma (Roxane Gay’s “Hunger”), or plant science (Hope Jahren’s nearly perfect “Lab Girl”).

Yet experiments in the genre continue, many of them, like Maggie Nelson’s breakthrough book, “The Argonauts,” from 2015, intimately connected to the drive toward new forms, and the use of fragments and white space, in contemporary poetry. These memoirs take cues from prose poems and lyrical essays, like those in Claudia Rankine’s “Citizen.” They also use the devices of poetry—interruption, compression, extended metaphor—to pay book-length attention to individual real lives, and, not coincidentally, they come from independent publishers known for their poets and poems.

The writer Jessica Anne told the Chicago Tribune that she began her book “A Manual for Nothing” because “I got excited reading unclassifiable books by authors like Maggie Nelson and Lidia Yuknavitch, and I wanted to try it.” She might have fashioned from the material of her life a conventional memoir of family dysfunction and bad sexual decisions. Anne was raised—or not raised—by a mother whose series of boyfriends rivalled, in their unreliability, her series of ailments, including a struggle with terminal cancer that seems to have been imaginary. Anne attended a “Fame”-style performing-arts high school, dropped out of college, discovered feminism, travelled to London, returned to Chicago to make a career as a singer and monologuist, and settled down (with her husband) to write the book.

“A Manual for Nothing” is part collage of half-remembered facts, part tongue-in-cheek guide to womanhood, and part imaginary dialogue, with speaking parts for Shakespeare’s Cleopatra and for Patti LuPone. Its numbered propositions, many of them in the second person, some of them absurd, accrete a willful resistance to realism, even as they frame what seem to be facts from her life. From “Maroon Chart,” a short chapter about menstruation: “Ovulation stains a period’s blood red as a stage curtain. . . . Once the menstrual blood is bright, you become your father’s next of kin.” Elsewhere in the book, Anne imagines telling a boyfriend, “I thought we were forever! I thought you were the pearl onion of my special, special day!” That’s probably not what she said at the time.

The dismemberment of a life into lists—one of the chapters comprises thirty-three short noun phrases—lets Anne frame events that must have terrified her at the time (her mother’s feigned cancer, for example) not as the most important moments in her life but as material to be assimilated, made into something just inches away from a joke. An unwanted sexual experience is “not quite rape, it’s just one of those awkward nights to giggle and gossip over. . . . Everyone’s laughing at you. Don’t cry.” In order to free herself from her past, and to push back against patriarchy’s expectations—so her chopped-up form suggests—she has to generalize, to satirize, to cut her life story into bits that she can crumple or rearrange. Paul Hunter learns equanimity by presenting his life as the life of a circus clown; Jessica Anne learns to imagine control.

The Brooklyn songwriter and poet Jasmine Dreame Wagner, in her own recent memoir, “On a Clear Day,” learns to notice particularity—and to get outside her own wish to generalize, to let big theories explain her life. “On a Clear Day” is a capacious book of traveller’s observations, cultural criticism, and quarter-life-crisis notes about deserts, gallery art, and Brooklyn bohemians in our “golden era of listicles.” It’s the kind of book that tries to take the temperature of a generation (Wagner’s first book appeared in 2012) or at least of a generation’s narrow, gallery-going, artsy urban slice. In Wagner’s Brooklyn, “the cacophony of lo-fi indie rock reverb” is also “the sound of gentrification, “the sound of if only,” “the sound of why me.” Throughout the volume, Wagner puts her name-checked role models (Didion, Deleuze, C. D. Wright, Leslie Jamison) to clever use.

Learning from poets’ sharply quotable lines, and from travel writers’ set pieces and first-person assertions, Wagner has made a book to dip into, open almost at random, or get lost in. In this respect, the book resembles, as she knows, the endless branching paths of social media, which become her subject: “my method of describing the sunset, its noise, is likewise noise. Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr.” Fragmentary prose, composed of disconnected observations and advice, goes back as far as the Bible, but Wagner’s combination of patience and jumpiness, and her search for “the real, presence, materiality” in snippets that keep slipping away from her, seem to fit our age of distraction and hyper-alertness, when we might look up from Proust, or from the Grand Canyon, to see if we’ve been retweeted, or liked, or tagged.

Wagner presents the sublimity of deserts, the welcome alienation of new sites, “the wind’s ripples in the dunes, the dunes’ ripples on the tectonic plate,” almost as a more conventional travelogue would. But her wish to say what she sees works at startling cross-purposes with her critic’s wish to generalize—it is as if she were grasping both for the high-level wisdom that G. Thomas Couser seeks in all memoir and for the ground-level immediacy that Joseph Conrad sought when he said that he wrote fiction “above all, to make you see.” Some gallery artists face the same dilemma: should they focus on visual experience, or on difficult abstract ideas? Sometimes, Wagner manages to follow both Couser and Conrad at once. Her description of winter in the suburbs, for instance, treats the snow as a tangible symbol for—but also as an alternative to—abstraction: “snow blots out the words on the strip mall marquee. It has no part. It speaks of no prior experience . . . . Like chicks swollen in our shells, we must scrape through its opacity to release ourselves.”

That line implies—in harmony with almost all memoirs, but against the grain of some poets—that we still have selves to release. Wagner seems to believe that, but she doesn’t take it for granted: she worries, and who wouldn’t, that the speaking self these days is too like an advertisement, or a means of self-aggrandizement. In her crowded Brooklyn, “in order to secure a voice equal to those of corporations . . . people become brands,” flaunting “the qualities of successful brands, such as media visibility [and] message consistency.” Sell yourself, in other words, or get erased. It’s a grim conclusion for the tradition of memoir, from St. Augustine to our time, and it’s a conclusion that Wagner’s canny fragments, like Anne’s sarcastic lists and Hunter’s tender metaphors, refuse. “The closer I come to my own erasure,” she writes of her time in the Southwestern deserts, “the stronger my work’s urge / to story… If my language is obscure / I’ll vanish in its steam.”