plastic

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 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. plastic is a poem about feeling a calling whilst submerged in the world of menial labour, 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 imaginings.