plastic - Matthew Rice

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 Ranci�re 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.