Besides satire, the Kilmarnock volume contains a number of poems such as "Halloween" (written in 1785), "The Twa Dogs" and "The Cotter's Saturday Night", which are vividly descriptive of the Scots peasant life with which Burns was most familiar; and a group such as "Puir Mailie" and "To a Mouse", which, in the tenderness of their treatment of animals, revealed one of the most attractive sides of Burns' personality.

[5] A few of the surviving copies have manuscript annotations where Burns has filled in names he had left blank in the printed text.

It contains an elaborate dedication to the Caledonian Hunt, an aristocratic society which had subscribed for 100 copies, in which Burns announces that he aims to be a National [i.e. Scottish] Bard, not just a regional one.

There was still a glossary, bit it too was much expanded from that in the first edition, now explaining Scottish words for readers who did not themselves speak Scots.

Later that year, Strahan would be the primary publisher of the first London edition, with the same title, though that was still printed by Smellie in Edinburgh.