Rogue Intensities

Rogue Intensities is a memoir grounded in Tasmania, with a richness of storytelling which emerges from the space between human, nature and environmental threads. It manages to straddle the intimate and the universal with ease a great deal of delight. The exploration of the Australian landscape through prose is a core tenet of Australian literature and the UWAP has been successful in finding a shining example of this in Rogue intensities. This work successfully adds to this canon in a way that extends it and enriches writing alongside it.  ‘Rogue Intensities is an uncannily timely work, its aesthetic achievement is deeply embedded in urgent concerns of our current moment. It breaks down the artificial divisions between science, art, creative production and history to forge an original perspective and a model of connection between the creative processes of nature, knowledge and writing. Angela manages to create intimacy with the elements of the observable world and with experiences through a careful detachment, which is akin to scientific record. Rogue Intensities engages the reader with what Hayden White termed the great ‘pleasure of information’ about creatures, the atmosphere, the weather, landscape, seasons, as they are encountered in everyday life. There is a great joy in this text of discovery as if writer and reader were encyclopaedists who have been granted permission to wonder at the world. I know of no other contemporary text that does this.’ Associate Professor Elizabeth McMahon, UNSW