no visual scars
The Globe and Mail, Saturday, January 1, 1994
Islands of the heart…and the world around

Review by Nicola Vulpe

Angela Hryniuk’s No Visual Scars and Lake Sagaris’s Medusa’s Children are both books written in the context of explicitly feminist poetics; both books represent attempts to retell and remake the world in accordance with these poetics and the world views they imply. Despite this concordance of purpose, however Hryniuk and Sagaris differ radically in their approaches to their art. Together, their books are testimony to the diversity poetry possible within a feminist discourse in Canada.
Angela Hryniuk is a poet of the private self, and No Visual Scars is a journey through her life and the lives of those she has known and loved. It is an intimate and unsettling journey, a chronicle of the outrages endured through life as a human being, as a woman. The graphic frankness of poems like Deanna, for example, is disquietingly blunt “her mother hears him taking a shower/ four in the morning/ while she pretends to sleep/ what is the reason for these lat night rapes/ of their daughter?” No Visual Scars ends with portraits of pregnant women and thus hope and promise, but its world is as hard as it is intimate, and (though there are only 36 poems) to read this collection through requires a touch of voyeurism.

This aspect of Hryniuk’s book is its greatest strength, but also its weakness. Intimacy and frankness in themselves do not make poetry. When she succeeds, as in transparent skin, a poem that might well have given the book its name, Hryniuk balances her art skillfully at the edge of sentimentality and pornography. Occasionally, however, she slips unhappily beyond, from poetry to sensationalism and, especially, confession. Her prose lyric, so effective in her best poems, fails to rise beyond the self, the images disturb, but do not remain.

walking inside circles
South Metro 1, November 14, 1989, Winnipeg

BOOK CARRIES STRONG MESSAGE
By Linda Wilson

A former River Heights resident was back in town to launch her first book and to participate in last week’s writer’s festival. Angela Hryniuk did readings from her book, Walking Inside Circles, a poetic narrative text about the emotional effects of incest on a young girl. The readings were held at the University of Manitoba, Times Change Cage and the Word on Stage Festival.
There aren’t a lot of graphic details about sexual abuse in her book and she says many people have asked her why she didn’t include them. She didn’t because “It’s everyone’s story” she says. Although Hryniuk is currently the editor of a Vancouver magazine, she worked for many years as a street youth worker and a suicide and rape crisis councilor. She also counselled teenage prostitutes. Hryniuk’s book is written in a unique format, using a narrative voice to recount past events and poetic prose to project the feelings of the young victim.

“The poetic prose is certainly analytical, about life and pain and healing.” The book carries a strong message to victims of sexual abuse, telling them not to be silent and warning them it does not help to forget. There is no healing in silence.
Some victims talk about it, some write about it and some publish their writings to help educate people. But, not everyone has to publish, she adds. The publication of Walking Inside Circles was a case of being in the right place at the right time. Hryniuk attended Vancouver’s West Word two-week writing workshop, where Ragweed Press editor Libby Oughton, heard one of the first readings from the incomplete book. Oughton asked Hryniuk to send her the manuscript when it was finished.

Gynergy, the feminist branch of Ragweed, published the book earlier this year. Hryniuk is now working on her second novel, which is in a collage form consisting of letters, journal entries, maps, poetry and prose.