Four Nose Jobs a Day: Poems

by Devendra Banhart

200 pages, Hardcover

Published June 2, 2026

About the author

Devendra Obi Banhart is a singer-songwriter and visual artist.

Reviews

[Alexander · Rating 5 out of 5]

Devendra Banhart's Four Nose Jobs A Day is the work of an artist who understands that absurdity and sincerity are not opposites but companions. The poems are wacky, funny, occasionally profound, and often delightfully strange. They wander through music, travel, pop culture, spirituality, and everyday observations with the casual confidence of a seasoned traveler who has learned that wisdom rarely arrives in a straight line.

Readers familiar with Banhart's music may expect the psychedelic folk mysticism of songs like "Sight to Behold" or the playful eccentricity of "At the Hop." While traces of that sensibility remain, this collection feels like a departure. The poems are not song lyrics stripped of melody. Instead, they are compact acts of attention, snapshots of a mind moving freely between the comic and the contemplative.

The closest literary relatives might be Robert Creeley and Richard Brautigan. Like Creeley, Banhart trusts brevity and rhythm. Like Brautigan, he has a gift for transforming odd associations into moments of genuine feeling. Yet the collection never feels derivative. Banhart's voice is distinctly his own: international, musical, spiritually curious, and deeply amused by the human condition.

References to music, celebrities, Buddhist teachers, and life on the road appear throughout the collection. Rinpoche is mentioned alongside the ordinary and the absurd, creating a world where enlightenment and nonsense comfortably occupy the same page. The poems often read like postcards from a restless imagination, equal parts travel journal and philosophical notebook.

What makes the collection succeed is Banhart's sense of rhythm. Even on the page, he thinks like a musician. His line breaks carry a pulse, and many poems unfold with the timing of a well-told joke. The humor is not decorative; it is essential. Beneath the whimsy lies an appreciation for grief, loneliness, love, and gratitude. The poems suggest that laughter is not an escape from seriousness but one way of enduring it.

Four Nose Jobs A Day will not appeal to readers seeking formal rigor or grand poetic statements. Its pleasures are smaller and stranger. These poems drift, meander, and occasionally stumble into insight. When they do, the effect can be unexpectedly moving.

Banhart reminds us that poetry does not always have to explain the world. Sometimes it simply has to notice it, laugh at it, and keep moving.