[Certain]

(I am reposting my same exact vote, word for word, to bump this above no-shows.)

NYCSPITZ: In the past, I have criticized your tangential takes on topics. Here, you took the opposite route and went too direct on it. But you're a great wordsmith, and your diction and rhyme scheme made this straightforward character sketch really work. There were a few forced rhymes, but mostly you made them work. You played to your strengths with this verse, unveiling this character through images and unique descriptors. I would have liked to see you do something with Julie, though, beyond simply describing the scene and the woman in it. The reveal that she shares the last name of her rapist wasn't so much a whiff as an irrelevant piece of information for me because you hadn't done enough to warrant it with no building of relationships or concrete ground to explain the psychological hurt of incest-specific pain. It didn't seem out of place as much as irrelevant on top of all this girl's other problems. You're a top-tier writer, and this verse had top-tier writing. But the content was a notch below.

Mr. J: This was an interesting conceptual attack on this topic. I liked the idea a lot, and the result was your best verse for this league in weeks. The strongest parts were the ones where you went with specificity, but toward the end you started being a bit vague and general. One of your weaknesses overall is a writer is a tendency to ramble. I don't mean you're redundant. I mean you don't complete thoughts and instead sort of sway through them, and that was a bigger weakness when you were addressing sort of hidden topics as you had been in the past few weeks. This week, though your last line was the fulcrum again, you were able to build a mission statement more cleanly. Your rhymes and diction aren't as strong as NYCSPITZ's, as very few are, but I thought they really picked up toward the middle of the verse. The first 10-or-so lines staggered along a little bit, inching toward a point but unwilling to make it so early in the verse. And while I understand the temptation to do that, I think you could have done a little more with lyricism in that portion of the verse to keep the reader interested. The diction and content of the second half of the verse might have been enough to win this battle because of a better concept. But NYCSPITZ brought his A game in those departments the whole way through and made for a better, cleaner, more fluid and engaging read in a very good battle.

Vote: NYCSPITZ