Plastic

Set during a single twelve-hour night shift in an injection molding factory, plastic is a book-length poem exploring the life of the industrial worker-turned-poetBringing together memoir, ekphrasis and satire, plastic is based on Matthew Rice’s personal experience working in a plastic molding factory for ten years, with depictions of factory work from literature, film and the visual arts. It illustrates alienated twenty-first-century Irish labor in poetic form, engaging with the inflictions and implications of a ‘post-industrial’, ‘post-Troubles’ society.Timestamped to indicate the claustrophobia of the lived experience of the worker, Rice’s collection is a radiated space of work and thought, a meditation on masculinity, sectarianism and intergenerational trauma, but at its core it’s a poem about feeling a calling whilst being submerged in the world of menial labor – making plastic airplane parts by day, making poetry by night.With Heaney-esque lyric brevity, plastic is an expansive and imaginative collection that acknowledges and gifts the working person a grace, dignity and truth in contemporary literature with an evocative, lucid, world-building language.