The poem titled "They Shot Wook Kim" by Bart Edelman is about the murder of a Korean immigrant who was working a night shift at a gas station. The beginning of the poem contain the numbers one to eight randomly scattered across the page. They are meant to represent the amount of times that Wook Kim was shot, revealing how senseless, purposeless and violent his death was. The author used the structure of his writing and irony to reveal in an artistic way how the world of Americans was a complex clash of cultures thrown into chaos. It was a word that the main character wasn't able to relate or understand, but he never really had a chance to.
