plastic: A Poem

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.

About the Author :
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, highly commended for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and included in the Arts Council of Northern Ireland’s top ten books of the year.

Review :
“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

"[F]uriously everyday and erudite . . . plastic is a poem, or cycle of poems, that is keenly aware of its status as a made thing among others, an artifact of labor in language, thought, and feeling. It’s partially a matter of terminology, which is both generic and peculiar . . . In the end, it is also a poem about knowledge and art: the words and music and imagery that live alongside the night’s labor, that make it bearable and at the same time highlight its violence." —Brian Dillon, 4Columns

"plastic takes the reader into a slippery, surreal orbit through life in 'post-Troubles' Northern Ireland. Each poem is titled with just a time stamp, the cumulative effect of which is an immersive, dizzying journey into the mind inside the factory. I read it in awe." —Michael Colbert, Referential Substack

"[A] sparse, punchy, and profound book-length poem that pries into the often absurd, almost surreal nature of twenty-first-century labor conditions . . . Rice's poems are rich with memorable imagery . . . Deeply engaging and bitingly funny (the root of work in Spanish and French is, 'an instrument of torture'), Rice is a poet of searing insight and truly human experience." —Booklist