Reviewed by Rich Follett for Readers' Favorite

“Cut” by Roger Harrison offers a chilling poetic firsthand look into the tortured inner life of a cutter - one who self-mutilates by cutting himself repeatedly in order to deal with the pain of personal experiences of rejection, betrayal and loss. The ten poems in this brutally honest, necessarily disturbing collection awaken the audience to the largely silent epidemic of cutting and ultimately affect the reader much as a car wreck from which we cannot look away despite our desire to do so. The result is a dark new reality of which we can never again be ignorant.

Some examples can be the following lines: “I'm going to take up the practice of phlebotomy on myself/To use as a philter for you (Phlebotomy); “The first drop is for/The first time I told you I loved you and you just laughed” (Drop); “The crimson curtain slowly drops down/Covering the pain that bores down deep inside/The crimson warmth flowing over my skin/With its fake promise of better things to come.” They all have a directness that leaves the reader breathless. In a mere twenty pages, Harrison opens a window to a world that is as cruel as the cuts of which he writes with such courage and candor. For added impact, the lines of the poems are arranged on the page in such a way that the poems themselves resemble, alternately, knife points and drops of blood. “Cut” is an unforgettable, must-read collection with the potential to change or even to save lives.