A new collection that oscillates between erudition and slapstick, from Virgil and Dante to a man who juggles his eyeballs.

The poems of I Could Have Been More Wrong come out of nowhere to proclaim eccentric half-truths with deceptive simplicity. Declaring that the spirit of life is the spirit of play, Kevin McCaffrey delights in confronting the cacophonies of experience and trying to make them rhyme. 

These verses, mostly set in traditional forms, draw energy from the joy of singing out, almost spontaneously, about the sometimes quirkily ordinary vicissitudes of being.

"Pirate's Gold" is story of a great American fortune, a man with the Midas touch, and his descendants who inherited more money than was good for them. A small-town boy from Massachusetts, Henry Huttleston "Hell-Hound" Rogers helped build Standard Oil into the world’s largest oil company, gaining renown as a notorious Wall Street “pirate.” After he died, his children inherited $49,000,000--billions in today's money. None of his descendants lived so large as Rogers’ son, Colonel Henry Rogers Jr., and his two children, Millicent and Harry. During the 1920s, the public was fascinated by the saga of Millicent’s ill-fated marriage to Count Salm, the Austrian tennis champion with matinee idol good looks. In the 1930s Harry’s involvement in the death of an actress at a drunken party was front page news in every city in the country. "Pirate's Gold" looks beneath the headlines to uncover the roots of these stories: the struggles over money and love, and the difficulties of living up to one’s famous family name.