plastic

Set during a single twelve-hour night shift in a factory, plastic is a book-length poem exploring the life of the industrial worker turned poet.

Bringing together memoir, ekphrasis and satire, Bplastic is based on Matthew Rice’s experience working in a plastic moulding factory for ten years. Illustrating alienated twenty-first-century Irish labour 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, 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 Rancière calls the ‘labourers in love with the intellectual nights’ and those ‘intellectuals in love with the toilsome and glorious days of the labouring people.’ plastic’s evocation and lucidity moves with grace through working class realities and hopeful imaginings.

•  A lyrical voice in the vein of Heaney and Levine that thinks through contemporary Irish culture and working-class contexts.
•  A gripping narrative poem with an innovative structure, time-stamped by theA minutes of a night shift.
•  A poem that deals uniquely with the lived experience and theoretical symbolism of the factory through history.
• Comps: What is Work by Philip Levine; Returning to Reims by Didier Eribon; C+nto by Joelle Taylor.