Drum Dream Girl is a narrative poem that describes how a historical figure—Millo Castro Zaldarriaga, a Chinese-African-Cuban drummer—subverts gender roles in Cuban music in the 1920s and 1930s. Engle’s poem is written in free-verse; there is no set meter, line length, or stanza length. Most of the 105 lines are short (contain few syllables); some contain only a single-syllable word. The poem’s 21 stanzas range from two lines to ten lines long.

Formal elements can be seen in the conversation between Engle’s poetry and Rafael López’s illustrations. Words only take up a small portion of the pages in the children’s book. Most stanzas are given two adjacent pages, which are filled with illustrations. The first time two adjacent pages feature two stanzas, one on each page, is the moment in the poem when the girl begins to take music lessons. The text about her finally being able to play music with another person is reflected by two stanzas coming together in the same spread of pages, as well as in López’s illustrations of the teacher and student working together.

On the final page, two stanzas are placed on the same page, creating a visual