plastic (Paperback)

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 poetBringing together memoir, ekphrasis, and satire, plastic is based on Matthew Rices 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 workers 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 labormaking 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. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.