plastic | eBook

Shortlisted for the 2026 PEN Heaney Prize for Poetry.

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 Rices 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 workers 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.plastics evocation and lucidity moves with grace through working class realities and hopeful imaginings.