Emergency Eyewash is the conceptual “brand” or umbrella for collaborative projects by Carol Szymanski and Barry Schwabsky with many others in the fields of art, writing, design, sound, etc. A poetry anthology in the form of an alphabet book for grown-ups, Emergency Eyewash ABC grew at the intersection of Szymanski’s interest in using letter forms as building blocks for visual art and Schwabsky’s awareness of how poetry can activate even the smallest units of linguistic matter. They have invited a diverse group of outstanding American poets of different generations working in various modes to write poems responding to the letters of the alphabet—28 in all, adding the ampersand to the canonical 26 after learning that early American ABC books often included & after Z, and the period with the idea that the alphabet in itself constitutes a complete thought, a sort of sentence.
