The poem opens like a shop sign, "Ranch Market 99. / The new Asian superstore!", and within a few lines it has wandered into theology. Pushing his cart, the "white guy" of the title discovers "there's no need to worry / God's imagination's running dry." It is a funny, sideways way of saying that the world still has surprises in it, and that a grocery aisle can prove it. The rest of the poem is the evidence. The final lines give the real point: when the man walks back outside, the familiar street looks, "for a little while," like "a strange bazaar" too. Wonder turns out to be contagious.
Reif writes in free verse, with no rhyme and no regular meter. The short lines sound like someone thinking aloud, and the rhythm comes from repetition and lists instead: "a dozen kinds of mushrooms / from a dozen fairy tales," or "names he's never heard" echoing "stalks he's never seen." The speaker never says "I." The man is "he" and "the white guy," a blunt label that, judging by the title, turns him into one more type among the varieties on display. The poem seems to know it is describing a visitor's point of view.
The second stanza steps back from the shelves to the supply chain. "Great ships still dock in San Francisco, LA, New York," and the word "still" lets the old picture of port cities as places where the world arrives hang over the scene. Then comes a chain of verbs: "throw up," "hauled," "raised," "unloaded," "arranged." A whole industry of work is compressed into a few lines and ends in "exotic mountains," as if all that labor had produced a landscape. Even "throw up their catch" has an accidental comic gulp in it.
The imagery turns to fairy tale and dream. "Dragon fruit stares in his face": the produce looks back, so the shopper becomes the one being examined. The vocabulary keeps tipping toward enchantment, with "something from a dream," "fairy tales," and later the shoppers "questing" like knights. When the names arrive, "Ngami, / Boc-ha, / Gabo", each gets its own line, like an item in a display case. The poem doesn't explain them, so the reader is left as unschooled as the man. By contrast, the pummelo is "like grapefruit / blown up with a pump," a homely simile that measures the unknown against the one fruit he can name.
The seafood section is the poem's comic high point. The tanks become small theaters: black bass "tread water in a crowded tank / next to a roomier one," and the jumbo shrimp, "looking wise," go "dive-bombing to the depths, / then letting themselves be carried / back up by the tank's water jets," like children on a ride. Even the dead fish "lay / on ice, as though sun-bathing," a line that turns the cold display into a holiday. The speaker's mood is so generous that nothing in the store can be grim. When he reads the signs "Fish Paste" and "Soak Squid," he calls it "more pleasant dissonance." That is a musical term for a clash, here given a friendly adjective. The oddities are enjoyed, not resolved.
The quiet stanza about morning slows the pace. The aisles "are just beginning to / awaken," and the line breaks stretch the sentence out as if the store itself were stirring. This makes the final stanza land harder. "America's new face, he thinks" is the only moment when the poem states a social idea outright, and it is offered as a passing thought. The real shift is in the last two lines: what he sees outside "is also a strange bazaar." That "also" carries the poem's argument. The store hasn't just introduced him to a different culture, it has loosened his own sense of what is normal.
The poem matters because it takes a subject that is often treated with anxiety or argument, a changing national population, and meets it with curiosity and humor. Its celebration is also honest about its angle. Words like "exotic" and "strange" come from an outsider's seat, and the poem never pretends otherwise. What it offers is a small, believable model of how a person might change, not by being lectured, but by pushing a cart through a place that is unfamiliar and finding himself delighted.