Day After The Waste Land by Will Averill, Illustrated by Kent Smith

Pop Culture Meets Midwest Soul

In Day After the Waste Land, Will Averill transforms T.S. Eliot’s modernist epic into a Midwestern fever dream. Lawrence, Kansas becomes the new “Unreal City”—where basketball courts replace chessboards, dive bars hum with verse, and local legends collide with pop culture.

Not parody but echo, this is Eliot refracted through the cracked mirror of small-town America: part homage, part reinvention. With annotations, wit, and razor-sharp imagery, Averill stitches fragments of history, culture, and memory into something both intimate and universal.

Equal parts poem and pop-art collage, Day After the Waste Land explores loss, identity, and belonging through the rhythms of Midwest life, capturing the strange beauty of a city that is at once ordinary and mythical. This is a striking remix of a timeless masterpiece—inviting readers to discover their own fragments in its pages.

Find out more about the contributors here: Author Will Averill and Artist Kent