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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-poet
Bringing 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. MATTHEW RICE was born in Belfast. He holds an MA in Poetry from Queen's University, Belfast, and is currently undertaking a PhD at The Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen's. His debut collection, The Last Weather Observer, was published in 2021 to critical acclaim, was Highly Commended for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and was included on the Arts Council of Northern Ireland's top ten books of the year.
Bringing 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. MATTHEW RICE was born in Belfast. He holds an MA in Poetry from Queen's University, Belfast, and is currently undertaking a PhD at The Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen's. His debut collection, The Last Weather Observer, was published in 2021 to critical acclaim, was Highly Commended for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and was included on the Arts Council of Northern Ireland's top ten books of the year.