Writing Alumnus Aaron Poochigian ’16 is set to release Mr. Either/Or: All the Rage (Etruscan Press, June 2023). The book is a sequel to Mr. Either/Or, published in 2017 by the same publishing house.
Set in the backdrop of a chaotic Manhattan apocalypse, Mr. Either/Or: All the Rage marks the return of the sardonic and seemingly unkillable FBI agent from Poochigian's first novel. This verse-novel features “you”, the reader, and your fictional girlfriend Li-ling Levine in a series of new adventures to save the world from villains fighting for anarchy and the end of the human race.
“This book, this book … what the hell is it?” said Charles Bock, New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Children and Alice & Oliver. “It is poems. It is television. It is hyperlinks and spy stuff and sex and hurricanes and a funhouse of mirrors and … all in iambic pentameter? Aaron Poochigian is a demented genius.”
David Hollander, author of Anthropica and L.I.E, also applauded the book's genre-bending nature, calling it “mind-bending, thoroughly subversive, and fun as all hell. Mr. Either/Or: All the Rage is like a Molotov cocktail tossed from a roller-coaster into a high-society ballroom. Read it aloud and wait for the authorities to show up.”
Poochigan specialized in poetry during his time at Columbia. He has translated four books written in Greek. His second book of poems, Manhattanite, won the 2017 Able Muse Press Award, and his first book, The Cosmic Purr, was published in 2012. He has a PhD in Classics, and was a 2010-11 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) recipient.
