"In PARTLY FALLEN, each poem is an act of divining—a deeply lyric dowsing for what is elemental. With taut and resonant metaphors, Deborah Akers calls us to see the world beneath surfaces, a world wherein a rainbow is a 'spectral bruise,' wherein a 'ragged crow / appears newly spat / from an earth god's maw.' Richly and subtly musical, Akers' work brings us compelling messages from our own depths. Each poem reveals the poet's fierce willingness to delve. Each offers us the chance to accompany her as she plunges 'into original substance.'"—Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate Emerita "Deborah Akers' PARTLY FALLEN is a superbly realized, significant book, a worthy addition to Airlie Press's fine series. 'entering the dense / family-silence of trees / my steps arouse / wings, which wake...'/ 'the flock rises / pulsing like an organ gone / adrift from its body...' Again and again, PARTLY FALLEN vividly evokes moments of experience in which discord prevails, and again and again the poems evoke a return to harmony. 'all too soon you will breach / the ocean's embrace / face your journey's / blank horizon // but tonight you drift / in the black waves / fallen stars / wrecked and drowsing / lit with the soft remnants / of radiance.'"—Ralph Salisbury, Pulitzer nominee, C.E.S. Wood Award Recipient, Winner Riverteeth Book Prize, Rockefeller Bellagio Award, two time Oregon Book Award Finalist "In Deborah Akers' PARTLY FALLEN, being open to the world is a constant prayer as she celebrates the persistence of nature in an imperfect world. These poems will gently lead you to a quiet but inspired place where salmon live 'a solitary life' until they are called home, a murmuration of starlings rising above the Astoria bridge pulses like a giant heart, and even stale sunflower seeds tossed out to feed common sparrows signal intimations of Wordsworthian transcendence."—Barbara Drake, author of , and other works of prose and poetry