The poems are written in free verse. They observe no poetic meter or rhythmic structure and they do not rhyme. The length of the poems varies greatly. Many consist of just a few lines. One poem, “your absence is a missing limb” (44) has only one line, but the poem that immediately follows it consists of 87 lines (“questions” [45-47]), which are divided into eight verse paragraphs of varying lengths. Another long poem is “home” (68-73), which is 132 lines divided into seven verse paragraphs. “broken english” (149-51) is yet another long poem.

These long poems are enclosed in a kind of rectangular text box, and the title is given above the poem in bold text. Kaur has said that she thinks of her book as consisting of one continuous poem stretching over 250 pages, and sometimes it is unclear where one poem ends and another begins. Only a few of the poems have a title at the top of the page. Others have what appears to be a title in italics printed below the poem, and still others have no title at all, which sometimes makes it hard to know whether they are actually part of the poem on either the previous or the following page.