Taylor Mali’s “How Falling in Love is like Owning a Dog” is a 40-line, free verse poem, meaning that there are no consistent patterns of rhyme, rhythm, or meter throughout the entirety of the piece. The poem has a total of eight stanzas, or groupings of lines, the longest being nine lines in length (Stanza 1) and the shortest being two (Stanza 4). Mali is not constrained by any formal requirements, making it easy for him to play around with literary devices like contradiction and repetition throughout the poem. This freedom within the form also speaks to the content of the poem in that Mali articulates, with greater accuracy, the inherently fluid and ever-changing nature of love. Free verse also gives Mali the freedom to go off script, ad-libbing new lines and playing off of live audiences based on their reception of the poem as it is being performed in real time (see: Further Reading “Listen to Poem”).

The comparison made between falling in love and owning a dog in the poem’s title is a simile: a