Nothing is more anticipated, more fraught, more loaded, more parodied, more remembered, or more desired than a love poem. In this bold new collection, J.P. Dancing Bear manages, rather remarkably, to evoke and invoke some of the great romantic gestures of poetic history while simultaneously charting entirely new poetic territory. At one moment, his rich aquatic imagery recalls Walt Whitman or Pablo Neruda while at other times his voice feels utterly new, as though he has invented a landscape for his language alone. Cephalopodic is a thoughtful, compassionate, honest, and lovely collection of poems that in our tenderest moments, I plan to tell my wife I ghostwrote . . . -Dean Rader