plastic by Rice, Matthew

Description

Author: Rice, MatthewPoetryPublished on 29 January 2026 by Fitzcarraldo Editions in the United Kingdom.Paperback | 112 pages135 x 195 x 12 | 162g
Set during a single twelve-hour night shift in a factory,plasticis a book-length poem exploring the life of the industrial worker turned poet.Bringing together memoir, ekphrasis and satire,Bplasticis based on Matthew Rices experience working in a plastic moulding factory for ten years. Illustrating alienated twenty-first-century Irish labour in poetic form,plasticengages 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 workers experience, this is a poem about feeling a calling while being submerged in the world of menial labour making plastic airplane parts by night, making poetry by day, uniting what Jacques Rancire calls the labourers in love with the intellectual nights and those intellectuals in love with the toilsome and glorious days of the labouring people. plastics evocation and lucidity moves with grace through working class realities and hopeful imaginings.