“This sardonic, bleakly moving book interrogates ideas of working-class masculinity and intergenerational trauma, with ‘hell as an idea of what work could be’; there are glimpses of hope in poetry itself, ‘the treasure buried in my father’s field.’” —Jennifer Lee Tsai, The Guardian
“[F]uriously everyday and erudite . . . plastic is a poem, or cycle of poems, that is keenly aware of its status as a made thing among others, an artifact of labor in language, thought, and feeling. It’s partially a matter of terminology, which is both generic and peculiar . . . In the end, it is also a poem about knowledge and art: the words and music and imagery that live alongside the night’s labor, that make it bearable and at the same time highlight its violence.” —Brian Dillon, 4Columns
“plastic takes the reader into a slippery, surreal orbit through life in ‘post-Troubles’ Northern Ireland. Each poem is titled with just a time stamp, the cumulative effect of which is an immersive, dizzying journey into the mind inside the factory. I read it in awe.” —Michael Colbert, Referential Substack
“[A] sparse, punchy, and profound book-length poem that pries into the often absurd, almost surreal nature of twenty-first-century labor conditions . . . Rice’s poems are rich with memorable imagery . . . Deeply engaging and bitingly funny (the root of work in Spanish and French is, ‘an instrument of torture’), Rice is a poet of searing insight and truly human experience.” —Booklist
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