This study intends to find out whether linguality and gender have any effects on reading ability of ESL learners while reading poetry. To this purpose a reading compression test whose passages were three poems with 30 items was employed. The analyzed data manifested that bilingual students outperformed monolingual students in their reading of poetic texts. However, male and female students did not show any significant difference in their reading comprehension score and the interaction between linguality and gender in reading score was non-significant. It is concluded that in an ESL classroom in which monolingual and bilingual students are attending, it is best to take into consideration the differences in the reading ability of monolingual and bilingual students in their reading of poetic texts. More