plastic

‘Matthew Rice’s plastic goes where poetry seldom does: the factory floor, the canteen, the night shift, and it does so astutely and with insight and grace. This is real and vital work.’— Nick Laird, author of Up Late

‘In plastic, the hours are “bent out of time” and slowed to their minutes on a factory night shift, where workers are churned in liminal borderlands and clocked by the ever-present spectre of death. Here, the relentless and precarious cycle of avoiding getting fucked over or worse in “far too narrow” circumstances. Rice is attuned to sound, and in these moving, visceral and formally precise poems, we are given dazzling glimpses of whole worlds lying just beyond the relentless tightrope of these dented, “bastarding jobs”. At the outset, the speaker confides: “Really it’s my heart that wakes me”. In this way, genuinely beautiful moments of hope and revelation spring from cracks in the strange and ominous like sparks from a grinder: crisp packets “doin’ the tango”; a smiley on the window; twin hares in an industrial park; machinists as concert pianists in another life, another universe. Rice’s book is one of deep compassion and vulnerability. plastic is 4am light in dark times.’— Dawn Watson, author of We Play Here

Matthew Rice was born in Belfast. Poems have appeared in The Poetry Review, *Poetry Ireland Review,* and The Forward Book of Poetry 2022 (Faber). He holds an MA in Poetry from Queen’s University, Belfast, and a PhD from The Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s. His debut collection, *The Last Weather Observer* (Summer Palace Press), was published in 2021 and was included on the Arts Council of Northern Ireland’s top ten books of the year.