Afterwards, she worked as a nurse and as the director of the mental health charity Islington Mind.
[7] Now a freelance writer, she has had numerous residencies, including fellowships at the University of Glasgow and the Courtauld Institute of Art.
[4][8] Rouse, in her earlier works, often draws upon her experiences as a nurse and mental health worker.
[4][13] Several of the poems in Timing were written as performances pieces, such as "Spunk Talking," and many of them have been described as being "hymns to the momentary and the marvelously futile: physical love, football, the preoccupations of patients on a dementia ward, fashion, and poetry itself.
This included the poem sequence "The Divided," which has been described as constructing "a modern meta-physic out of love and the daily, set against the latent (sometimes tragic) divisions in contemporary society.