The book jacket of A Life on Paper calls Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud “France’s own Kurt Vonnegut.” But during my brooding, meandering tour through this first English collection of his work, it was not Vonnegut’s glee that Châteaureynaud showed me.

Procedures regularize, give to an experience a repeatable form. In Joan Retallack’s new collection of works written between 1980 and 2010, Procedural Elegies/Western Civ Cont’d, meaning is located in formal construction.