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Plastic, January 2026
Paperback / e-Book
A Poem
Soft Skull
January 2026
On Sale: January 13, 2026
256 pages
ISBN: 1593768036
EAN: 9781593768034
Kindle: B0F4QBNM16
Paperback / e-Book
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Fiction Poetry
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.
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