plastic: A Poem

by Matthew Rice

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.

Genres: Poetry

256 pages, Paperback

Published January 13, 2026

Reviews

[Maddie]

I don’t think I was the right reader for this collection. I kept waiting for that “ah-ha!” moment for it all to click for me, but never got there.

Despite that, I think this is a solid book of poetry from a unique perspective that I’ve never read before! Thank you to Soft Skull for my advanced copy!

[Tina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great poem!
Full review soon
Thank you to Soft Skull Press for my copy!

[Juliano · Rating 5 out of 5]

“In the name of fuck! you’d think the moral order of the universe / depended on the right material”. Matthew Rice’s Plastic is a sequence of poems unfolding over a twelve-hour shift in a plastic factory, covering rich and varied ground, from Gawain to the depersonalising forces of late-stage capitalism. “During the job interview / when I uttered my own name, // the awareness of self, / as if I hadn't earned the vowels, // rang strange in my head, / hung in the office // like necessity or myth”. The mind-numbing and soul-crushing is often counterpoised with images of lightness, life’s beauty as easily corrupted as the grimmest realities are shot through with hope. “It’s been fifteen years // since he arrived / with a few empty phrases // to work through the night, / a shaft of morning sun // warming his fleece / when, near the big machine, // they found him hanging / at the first klaxon.”, Rice writes in ‘20:01’. The future is ever portended: “even those christened with youthful names / must bear them into the future”; “it's true my machine marks time / with each spindle-cutting revolution, / its mundane magic rumouring the future”. As the poems and the night goes on, hope is ever more distant: “When we look up at stars on break / we see only stars behind / the exhaled Milky Way / of Bobby's Golden Virginia, / ways to navigate shift patterns, / nothing seismic or anything approaching / truth; for us stars mean only night shift, / insanity of depth, / the slow individual seconds / during which the dotted starlight / doesn't burn fast enough.” The declaration that “if one can star the dark / one can satirize it” explains the frequent, moving subversion of light. Right through to ‘07:28’ and ‘07:31’, Rice is quietly devastating in his playfulness but leaves room for undeniable brightness, referencing Raymond Carver’s ‘Happiness’: “that poem about happiness / coming on slowly, // realisation as light drawn / across a factory floor”, “who wrote that poem who was it / ah yes that poem about being happy”. Thanks Clare from Fitzcarraldo for another proof - out 25 Jan 2026!

[Aaron Long]

This book will find its audience for sure.


Thank you to Edelweiss for an early copy of the book.

[George · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this! The author worked in a plastic molding factory for 10 years-so this poetry is based in that.

I didn’t know how I would feel about this because it is so specific, but there are some lines in here that felt so universal.

Thank you soft skull press for the gifted copy. All opinions are my own!

[karissa✨ · Rating 5 out of 5]

AMAZING.

The night is proletarian,
a morgue of ghosts
given the present is a borderline:

if the purpose of existence
is to give meaning
to the lives of others

how does one account for loneliness?