Review: “Imaginary Dad” by Tina Cane

Reviewed on 6/28/2025

★★★★★

“Imaginary Dad” is the painful acknowledgement of an ordinary reality. Cane starts with a lighthearted line, “Dad was so imaginary he ceased to exist.” The hurt of losing comes not from itself, but the endless days thereafter, wondering the what-ifs. She understands that he isn’t some ragged, masculine, or cinematic figure (“cheeks smeared green with camouflage grease”); “he was just a married guy.” Not a brave odyssey, not a wonderful superhero story, the father’s absence just is. Cane imagines Dad “living/ in a small town” — he lives the same normal life, yet their life paths do not converge. The heart gets no solace to cover up the sorrow, just his brutality making a thousand cuts. 

The speaker extends her longing to “my made-up cousins.” In her mind, they, too, are “searching for something/ … never knowing/ what it was.” The ache in her heart is the ache they perhaps never experience; it may be that the people whom she feels the utmost affection for only see her as a stranger. Cane ends the poem with a cry of both hope and despair: “he belonged to me.” In this inter-being of loss and ownership, someone who will forever be her father yet never show up, Cane quietly fades into the poem’s words.

Full Poem: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/159445/imaginary-dad