Fivehundred Swimming Pools

**Highly Commended in the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards 2026**

Through long poems, parataxis, pop culture, internet rabbit holes and lyric elements, Fivehundred Swimming Pools thematically meditates upon what it could mean to know or see crude oil from within an urban setting where the consequences of extraction are continually deferred, outsourced or otherwise made invisible.

'Fivehundred Swimming Poolsoccupies the continuum of calamity and quotidian that is oil, spilled or otherwise. Connor Weightman's petropoems extract, disperse, make visible amid history and anecdote, trivia and statistic, fact and feeling a fathom of oil, a rod of plastic. A mile of still air.' Shastra Deo