plastic: A Poem [Paperback]

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 experience working in a plastic molding factory for ten years. Illustrating alienated twenty-first-century Irish labor in poetic form, plastic engages with the inflictions and implications of a “post-industrial,” “post-Troubles” society, all while weaving in depictions of factory work from literature, film, and the visual arts.

Time-stamped to highlight the claustrophobia of the worker’s experience, Rice meditates on masculinity, sectarianism, and intergenerational trauma. But at its core is a poem about feeling a calling while being submerged in the world of menial labor—making plastic airplane parts by night, making poetry by day.

Invoking the brevity of Seamus Heaney, plastic is an expansive and imaginative poem that offers the working class a grace, dignity, and truth not often found in contemporary literature.“This sardonic, bleakly moving book interrogates ideas of working-class masculinity and intergenerational trauma, with ‘hell as an idea of what work could be’; there are glimpses of hope in poetry itself, ‘the treasure buried in my father’s field.’” —Jennifer Lee Tsai, The Guardian

With cutting, spare elegance, passages of the long poem tangle with the complex and violent implications of petrochemical supply chains. —Cassie Packard, Frieze

[F]uriously everyday and erudite . . . plastic is a poem, or cycle of poems, that is keenly aware of its status ló(