When All Is After

"Peter Barton would get a wink of approval and a smile from William Carlos Williams. His poetry is simple yet reverberant, his aching wishes and pale sorrows are those we all share. You will read these poems more than once."

-Peter Davis, Academy Award winning filmmaker, author of Girl of My Dreams

"I seem to be stories now," reflects the narrator of Peter Barton's When All Is After, but the poems refuse tidy narratives and easy explanations. Here is a narrator that can observe a beloved after decades of marriage, his adult children, or experiences from his own past with eyes that are as open and attentive as in a first encounter. While this may be a debut poetry collection, the candor and complexity Barton brings to his representations of daily life build upon a long, accomplished practice in filmmaking and photography. What's striking about Barton's gaze is that even when he trains it on some of the book's darker subject matters, such as mortality, regret, and addiction, his commitment to honesty is not brutal but deeply tender."

-Allyson Paty, Author of Five O'clock on The Shore and co-founder and editor of

Singing Saw Press

"I'm married to Mandy Patinkin who understands Shakespeare as if it were his first language, and while I only understand it when he speaks it, I have a love of poetry, which he does not relate to...That might change soon, because I intend to read Peter Barton's new collection to him on a nightly basis, because they speak such truth to the complex experience of a long life, the wonder of still being here, the glory of being in the moment and the challenge of not letting the past and regret dominate the astonishing now."

-Kathryn Grody actress and author of A Mom's Life