STRIDENTIST POEMS is a complete bilingual edition of the major early works of Manuel Maples Arce, founder of Stridentism, Mexico's most radical avant-garde movement of the 1920s. Maples Arce's Stridentist poetry appeared at a time when Mexico was the center of the avant-garde, in a milieu that included Kahlo and Rivera, Modotti and Weston. His early books -- Inner Scaffolds, CITY, and Prohibited Poems, collected here along with his first Manifesto -- advanced the Stridentist program for a revolutionary poetry with increasingly refined precision. Made of the reaction between the poet's material reality and subjective emotional experience, his poems were meant to send 'Chopin to the electric chair!'