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!

[lamp]

Am I someone who
reads poetry
and appreciates
it?



Ummmmm

[Leah Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I wake at 3am, the hour no one
wants. Really, it’s my heart that wakes me
beating its way out.
…
It’s Monday tomorrow, it always is when dreams are alarms.”

[Tina · Rating 5 out of 5]

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

[Dr. Devine · Rating 5 out of 5]

These are the types of poems I want to write.
Real life struggles, beautiful meanderings, told smartly. Real proletarian stuff.
Loved it.

[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!

[Ailey | Bisexual Bookshelf · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in supply-chains —
It's a bit like this place,
tethered to the machine
with an option to go hungry, or find another factory
to feel the same in.”

Thank you to the publisher for the gifted copy! This book was released in the US on January 13, 2026 by Soft Skull Press.

Matthew Rice’s Plastic unfolds across a single twelve-hour night shift in an injection molding factory, but the emotional terrain it covers is far wider. From the opening pages, the poems root themselves in the textures of working class labor: clock-in machines, the chemical sting of formaldehyde, the slow churn of industrial time. Workers move through this environment with a sense of interchangeability that feels both intimate and systemic: “I outlast, I barely last,” the speaker reflects, a line that captures the precarious balance between endurance and erasure that runs through the book.

Rice’s poetry is compressed and percussive, built from images that move between the mechanical and the dreamlike. Machines mark time with their operations while the speaker’s mind wanders to childhood farms, distant mountains, and the possibility of another life. These shifts in attention feel essential to the book’s structure, as the factory is not only a workplace; it becomes a psychological landscape where memory, fatigue, and imagination collide.

What moved me most is how clearly i>Plastic situates individual experience within a broader system. The workers inhale carcinogenic fumes while management promises improvements. Colleagues are injured. Some die. Others remain for decades, like the seventy-year-old woman who has spent most of her life in the same factory. Rice shows how labor can narrow the horizon of possibility until survival itself begins to feel like disappearing.

Yet the book also insists on the fragile dignity of making art within that environment. The speaker writes poems in his notes app between shifts and carries literature with him to the factory floor. Poetry becomes a small act of resistance against the machinery that structures his life. I didn’t catch every Irish reference or cultural detail, but the emotional clarity of the poems carried me through. By the end, I felt not only the exhaustion of the work but also a deeper sense of solidarity with the people who endure it. i>Plastic is a haunting portrait of labor under capitalism and a reminder that even in the most mechanized spaces, the human impulse to create meaning persists.

📖 Read this if you love: meditative poems about labor, time, and survival under capitalism; books that blend memoir, philosophy, and social critique; art made from within the machinery of industrial work; or literature that finds dignity and reflection inside ordinary labor.

🔑 Key Themes: Working Class Life and Industrial Labor, Alienation and Replaceability under Capitalism, Intergenerational Labor and Inherited Futures, Masculinity and Workplace Culture, The Quiet Violence of Supply Chains, Art and Poetry as Survival.

Content / Trigger Warnings: Suicide (minor), Death (minor), War (minor), Fire (minor), Blood (minor), Animal Death (minor), Alcohol (minor).

[Tessy Bowman · Rating 2 out of 5]

I thought some sections of the poem were beautifully written and made thoughtful observations about society, but at other times they just felt mildly nonsensical for the sake of being slightly whimsical.

I think this book’s description tees readers up for disappointment. Had I read it on a whim, I think maybe I would have liked it more - but I was absolutely chomping at the bit to read the proclaimed ‘expansive meditations’ on society, and I was excited to hear these extremely in depth hot takes, but I was sorely disappointed. I was looking for society to be read for exactly what it is, and for the capitalists to be completely obliterated in poetic form - not the case.

I think this just might not be for me.

The idea the poem is also based around the patterns of a night-shift is very loose, as the time stamps merely seem to title collections of sentences that may or may not relate to what our protagonist is up to - maybe I was looking for more of a slightly poetic book, rather than a book shaped poem; hence the disappointment.

Maybe poetry isn’t for me.

Comically, my favourite writing was in the ‘In Cittiglio’ section, after his night shift had ended.

I also found the descriptions mildly repetitive. I understand that hence the subject matter, the reader must have the point hammered home that life is mildly monotonous in the factory - however I think there are more creative comparisons to make than describing a variety of different things as being reminiscent of the galaxy, for example.

Flicking back through the pages, re reading some of its extracts, I wonder why I didn’t gel with it. Who knows, maybe it all just went over my head, and maybe I look really stupid writing this? Unfortunately I have to go with my gut, I really wish it had been everything I wanted.

[Elia Kent · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having read this in bits and pieces as I found it in various book shops, I can firmly vouch that this is a masterpiece of poetic invention. Following a single 12 hour night shift, this collection emphasizes not only the monotony of factory shift work, but the intricacies of one person and how much personal history they carry - as well as how it affects not only their thoughts but also their daily processes and experiences. There's something refreshing and creative about the titles just being timestamps of the night passing. It's a wild ride filled with poems that sometimes follow on from each other, and sometimes pop up unconnected to everything. There is a form of a lullaby to these, as well as some that are violently shocking and yet still beautiful. Overall: artistically grey, an incredibly scenic monotony.

[Avery Marley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Plastic: A Poem is a formally sharp and deeply immersive work that transforms the experience of factory labor into something precise, lyrical, and psychologically charged. Set over a single night shift, the poem captures the rhythms of industrial work, the distortions of time, and the quiet intensity of the worker’s inner life.

Matthew Rice’s language is controlled yet evocative, balancing clarity with emotional depth. The poem’s structure heightens its sense of confinement and repetition, while its reflections on identity, masculinity, and creative longing feel organic rather than imposed.

A disciplined and memorable work that gives rare literary attention to industrial life with intelligence and dignity.

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

thank you to Goodreads for the copy of this book.

plastic: a poem is a hallucinatory, almost dream-addled trek through an exhausted night shift at a factory. something sinister is lurking as time moves slowly. Rice demands a lot of the reader as the poems trade on Cultural knowledge that not all may have. I liked this best as an exploration of the "vibe" of the overnight shift and the circumstances that brought a worker there.

[Jiapei Chen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Titled with time stamps during a night shift at the plastic molding factory Rice works at, these poems were intriguing but ultimately not satisfying. There were some interesting bits on machine vs human, dehumanizing conditions at the factory, beauty yet found in the mundane. Many of the references are pretty specific and I would’ve missed them had it not been for the section at the end explaining them.

[Lu Louche]

Can’t & won’t rate them anymore. The third small poetry collection from Fitzcarraldo and I didn’t like a single one. I was hopeful in the beginning but this quickly petered out. Maybe a single hand full of nice ones? The last one that is kinda out of line was interesting but man, non of them catch me, they feel too normal? Too modern? Don’t know…

[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

[Priya Basra · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty cool

[Gabrielle Showalter · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love a concept poem!! Only real criticism was that I wanted it to be longer

[Venneh · Rating 5 out of 5]

A neat chapbook that is made up of the poetry that a night shift worker wrote over 12 hours of his shift at a plastic injection molding plant.

[Paige]

Not for me :/

[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!

[Gary Homewood · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book length poem, a single night, time stamped, of menial industrial labour, as beautiful verse, digressing on myriad tangents, themes and reference points.

So beautiful.

[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?