The aim of the current study was to evaluate the effect of employing poetry reading task on improving Iranian EFL intermediate learners' critical reading skills. The study was conducted with 60 female students learning English at Kish Mehr institute in Qazvin (Iran). The students who were all at the intermediate level were divided into two groups: haiku poetry reading group and traditional reading group. Haiku was chosen because it is a kind of visual poetry which depicts attitudes, feelings and aspects of everyday life through breathtakingly beautiful and enigmatic images. On the other hand, the Select Reading book which contains various ordinary texts was taught to the second group. After treatment and at the end of semester a post-test was used to measure progress in the students' critical reading skills. The analysis indicated that the haiku poetry reading students did significantly better than the traditional reading group.