Every night, while the rest of us sleep, plastic injection molding machines keep running — and somebody has to run them. For a decade, that somebody was Matthew Rice: a poet from Belfast working 12-hour night shifts in the factories that make the plastic parts inside almost everything you own.

His new book, plastic: A Poem (Fitzcarraldo Editions / Soft Skull Press), compresses those years into a single shift, clock-in to clock-out — a night of urban legends, skull-and-crossbones warnings on bags of molding material, a hidden copy of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the strange things that happen to the mind at 3 a.m.

Matthew talks about the toll of working nights, the fumes nobody was protected from, why factory labor almost never appears in Irish poetry, the famous poet who became his first reader — and the mome ...