WILL AVERILL & KENT SMITH
DAY AFTER THE WASTE LAND (A reimagining of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land)
Pop Culture Meets Midwest Soul
Forget London. In Will Averill’s remix, the “Unreal City” is Lawrence, Kansas—where poetry lives in dive bars, basketball is religion, and pop culture crashes into myth. Kent Smith’s raw, pop-art illustrations crank up the volume, making this wasteland anything but wasted.
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Like Eliot’s London, Lawrence is a place of contradictions, Day After the Wasteland is not parody, instead it is a contemporary echo of Eliot’s masterpiece. where basketball courts replace chessboards, dive bars echo with poetry, and local legends mingle with modern pop culture.
A pop-art book, as well as a poem, Day After the Wasteland is at once deeply personal and widely resonant; it invites readers to consider how fragments of history, culture, and memory can be pieced together to shore against our own ruins.
Part homage, part reinvention, this urban poem explores loss, identity, and belonging, drawing on the rhythms of Midwestern life while honoring the layered brilliance of the original. With vivid annotations and wry imagery, it captures the strange beauty of a city both familiar and elusive. A striking remix of a timeless masterpiece, Day After the Wasteland invites readers to find their own fragments in its pages.
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WILL AVERILL is a writer, director, and nonprofit professional based in Lawrence, Kansas, with a background that bridges the arts and community work. A graduate of the University of Kansas with a degree in Theatre, Will has spent over two decades creating original works for stage, radio, and screen—often with a healthy dose of humor, heart, and the occasional puppet. You can find examples of Will’s work at https://www.playscripts.com/playwrights/bios/441 and shttydeal.com.
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KENT SMITH (SMITTY) is a dimension-jumping illustrator, designer, sculptor, teacher, problem-maker, problem-solver, and magic-man sharing grand visions from afar. His work can be found on Star Wars toys, Free State beer labels, custom masks, huge woodblocks prints, giant festival sculptures and tiny trading cards. Smitty uses his crazy brainpowers and a menagerie of media to solve problems. Smittytown.com
instagram.com/smittytownart/, facebook.com/KentSmithIllustration/
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