PLASTIC: Matthew Rice in conversation with Andrew McMillan

We are thrilled to welcome Matthew Rice to Blackwell's where he will be in conversation with Andrew McMillan for Plastic, a book-length poem out now from Fitzcarraldo.

Doors: 6.30pm, Starts: 6.45pm

Tickets are £4 or admission is free when purchasing a copy of the book in advance.

About Plastic:

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, plastic is based on Matthew Rice's 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 worker's 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.' plastic's evocation and lucidity moves with grace through working class realities and hopeful imaginings.

About the author:

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.

If you cannot make the event but would like a dedicated copy of the book, please email events.manchester@blackwell.co.uk or call us on 0161 274 3331.

Our event format is usually a 45 minute discussion between the author and interviewer, followed by a chance for audience members to ask questions. There will be the opportunity to get your book signed/dedicated after the event. Events are a brilliant opportunity to discover new books, meet authors and likeminded readers and learn something new.

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