He wrote the novels :

As well as the short story collections :

Recently, he edited the book The Worst Years of Your Life: Stories for the Geeked-Out, Angst-Ridden, Lust-Addled, and Deeply Misunderstood Adolescent in All of Us, including short pieces by George Saunders, Jennifer Egan, A. M. Homes and Nathan Englander. At one time, Poirier was named "the young American writer to watch" by the Times Literary Supplement. He has been the recipient of a Maytag Fellowship and a James Michener Fellowship.

He is currently working as a screenwriter and is the author of Smart People, and a film version of Alice Munro's short story Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage. He was awarded a Chesterfield Screenwriting Fellowship with Paramount Pictures.

He is a graduate of prestigious programs at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, Georgetown University, and Stanford University. He taught at Bennington College.

He lives in Weston, Connecticut with his partner, Edward Cahill.