Provides paratextual readings of Anglophone and Hispanophone poems about celebrities, panics, pandemics and colonisation in the nineteenth-century United States Fills a gap in the scholarship of nineteenth-century poetry by critically engaging the paratext as an aesthetic design and practice Reveals more clearly and immediately that nineteenth-century newspaper poems were not self-enclosed aesthetic objects separate from public life. Many of these verses were not simply read but also memorized and quoted, reworked and imitated, collected, scrapbooked, anthologized, edited, and exchanged within and outside of complex paratextual spaces in tune with the readerly needs of consumers Raises important and difficult questions about how readers engaged newspaper poems, and particularly, how they understood poetic speakers Drawing examples from over 200 English-language and Spanish-language newspapers and periodicals published between January 1855 and October 1901, Paratextuality in Anglophone and Hispanophone Poems in the US Press, 1855-1901 argues that nineteenth-century newspaper poems are inherently paratextual. The paratextual situation of many newspaper poems (their links to surrounding textual items and discourses), their editorialisation through circulation (the way poems were altered from newspaper to newspaper) and their association and disassociation with certain celebrity bylines, editors and newspaper titles enabled contemporaneous poetic value and taste that, in the mid- to late-nineteenth century, were not only sentimental, Romantic and/or genteel. In addition to these important categories for determining a good and bad poem, poetic taste and value were determined, Bonifacio argues, via arbitrary consequences of circulation, paratextualisation, typesetter error and editorial convenience.