The “Strong Meat” of Sarah Hall’s Short Fiction

Through the close reading of four short stories from the three collections Sarah Hall has published so far, this contribution aims to demonstrate the feminist poetics she has developed when tackling the short form. Hall has been consistently using the expression “strong meat” to describe the human experience as a crossover of the corporal and the political. In her short stories, it comes across as relating to the intensity of alienation characterizing men/women relationships, which raises questions about civility and civism. Because of the form’s compression, the stories deal in the metaphysics of life, more precisely in Hall’s case, the metaphysics of immanence, which characterizes her work as posthuman feminist. Short stories, Hall has said, “un-simplify.” Her short stories rise to the challenge of portraying, often graphically, the complex interrelations of soma and sêma, her writing getting under the skin of propriety.