Is poetry too vague and mysterious for you? Are epic poems too long for your attention span? Let me introduce you to the world of "Flash Poetry." Sort of like the snobby little brother to flash fiction, Flash Poetry works the same way. Abandon any hope of character development and embrace the Attention Deficit Disorder-influenced quick fix of language broken down to its most playful.

These two books are fine examples. Nice Hat. Thanks is especially enjoyable considering how it was created. Joshua Beckman and Matthew Rohrer composed their poems at improvisational readings across the country this year. Their leapfrog approach to writing takes their short pieces to places that seem both natural and unexpected.

It's like haiku with humor. One of them reads: "The bar is full./More people enter/and notice it too." There are also images that burn with a surreal beauty: "Tomorrow seems distant./Like three sailboats sailing through three wineglasses."

Beckman and Rohrer have achieved something wonderful here. Their publisher's website (versepress.org) even has a tour diary that features poems written in Portland during their recent stop at Pacific Switchboard.

Sparrow's work is just as whimsical but also has a perverse slant to it. He's obviously done time studying Hakim Bey, urging fellow idealists to embrace their revolutionary selves with a brainy laugh. One cycle of poems chronicles his struggles to get published by The New Yorker (and yes, he triumphed), while another section contains fake recipes for ice that are both hilarious and oddly stunning.

Whether you're looking for books of poetry for people who don't like poetry or just something you can read on your next lunch hour, both of these small-press artifacts are fun, and are no flash in the pan. Kevin Sampsell

"the world's best books": taste, culture, and the modern library
by Jay Satterfield
(University of Massachusetts Press, 248 pages, $29.95)

The nation's leading website devoted to the history and collecting of the Modern Library series is operated by Portlander Scot Kamins at www.dogeared.
com.

Between 1917 and 1970, the Modern Library was a cultural institution that supplied America's burgeoning middle class with uniformly bound, hardcover copies of "the world's best books" for about a buck. Author Jay Satterfield recounts in captivating detail how publishers Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer purchased the faltering reprint series in 1925 and turned the Modern Library into a modest empire that would ultimately bankroll the establishment of Random House.

The Modern Library achieved its success by walking the thin edge between culture and commerce. On one hand, Cerf and Klopfer included enough left-leaning, modernist titles to win the approval of bohemian intellectuals. On the other, the publishers put the screws to the nation's booksellers to install bigger store displays and devote more shelf space to the books.

The Modern Library wasn't all a high-minded crusade to promote world literature. If a title didn't sell its quota of 2,000 books a year, it was ruthlessly dropped from the series--a fate that befell Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby in the 1930s. (Today, ironically, Gatsby is one of the most coveted titles by Modern Library collectors: A copy sold on eBay last month for more than $1,200.)

World War II, which precipitated the explosion in paperback publishing, sounded the death knell for the Modern Library, although the series would soldier on for 25 more years. Regrettably, Satterfield gives short shrift to the series' rapid decline in the late '60s, which would see the introduction of some of the Modern Library's most ambitious titles, such as Catch-22 by Joseph Heller and V. by Thomas Pynchon. Efforts to revive the series in the '90s never quite recaptured the magic: The books now cost almost as much as regular trade editions. Matt Buckingham