Matthew Rice

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 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 Ranciere 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.

Matthew Rice is a long-time observer and illustrator of cities, buildings and all those who inhabit them, with an uncanny ability to express the energy of a place through a few lines of ink and splashes of paint. In the first book in this new sketchbook series, he explored the glittering canals of Venice: now he turns his attention to Rome, the Eternal City. Rome is a place where the ancient, the baroque and the modern clash, and this tension runs through Matthew's paintings. In this guide, he makes sly juxtapositions of people and animals against the backdrop of the city's architectural and artistic wonders, its ruins and its ristoranti. Matthew's ability to notice detail, his sense of light and dark, his expert's knowledge of architecture and how it creates an atmosphere allows him to present Rome, in these pages, in its all its living, breathing splendour. Following the same landscape format as Matthew's real-life sketchbooks, Rome: A Sketchbook will combine enchanting watercolour illustrations with an informed, personal and witty text, and promises to delight all visitors to Rome, armchair or actual.