[Certain]

NYCSPITZ: I don’t know how I wanted you to end this, but the ending was the issue here. It was such a fun, absurdist ride along the way. You told the action very well, and it read quickly yet vividly. You’ve improved and tightened your storytelling over the last year or so, or at least, you know when you need to show your best. You also rhymed well and cut back on adverbs and overly flowery description in favor of pure action. There was nothing ponderousness here, which I really appreciated. My problem was that the ending wasn’t developed and foreshadowed enough. He fought all the way there only to become a possessed assassin, if I’m understanding correctly, which is a pretty devastating conclusion, but it wasn’t told with much emotional resonance. I think that’s something you still need to work on. You don’t always connect well to the reader, and you never made me really appreciate or even understand much less empathize with this protagonist. Instead, you had me really enjoying his journey. It was an action movie with an unearned dramatic finish. But it was a very good action movie up until then.

dead man: I don’t think this was your finest effort, not quite up to par with the rest of the full verses you dropped this season. But I think what you did best here was embody the topic in a very head-on form. My interpretation was a corpse pondering whether to reanimate or a lover who refuses to leave his woman’s side even after she dies, though you were indirect enough to leave a lot up to the reader. What I wished was that there had been more specificity and detail. The read was fluid, and there were a few great sections (such as the tally marks and the mattresses line). But it never grabbed me, not in the way I expect from a dead man verse or in the way NYCSPITZ grabbed me. I’ve read this verse about seven times, trying to decipher the exact intended meaning, but there’s at least one contradictory line for any interpretation. All of this is to say that this verse felt a bit half-baked and under-inspired. It was like the opposite of your Winter Topical championship verse, where you went all the way in on your topic and had people surprised by the specificity of your verse. Here, you went vague and probably played it safe, in all honesty. But I enjoyed NYCSPITZ’s verse more, and even the problems with his ending weren’t enough for me to vote for your verse.

Vote: NYCSPITZ