ABSTRACTRecently, Ristic and Nadarajah [A new lifetime distribution. J Stat Comput Simul. 2014;84:135–150] introduced the Poisson generated family of distributions and investigated the properties of a special case named the exponentiated-exponential Poisson distribution. In this paper, we study general mathematical properties of the Poisson-X family in the context of the T-X family of distributions pioneered by Alzaatreh et al. [A new method for generating families of continuous distributions. Metron. 2013;71:63–79], which include quantile, shapes of the density and hazard rate functions, asymptotics and Shannon entropy. We obtain a useful linear representation of the family density and explicit expressions for the ordinary and incomplete moments, mean deviations and generating function. One special lifetime model called the Poisson power-Cauchy is defined and some of its properties are investigated. This model can have flexible hazard rate shapes such as increasing, decreasing, bathtub and upside-down ba...