Mission Creep began as reworkings of the CIA's Human Resources Exploitation Training Manual. Attempts to torture the text itself—obeying literary constraints, employing audio editing tools, and displacing it with other voices, including Hannah Arendt's and Evel Knievel's—reveal convoluted narratives, transmissions that contemplate whether torture provides useful information. At once a fugue and an absurdist comedy, info-overload and pure tone, Mission Creep comes on with the fire of apocalyptic prophecy and melts on the tongue like the last snowflake of winter.

Joshua Trotter lives in Montreal, Quebec. His first book, All This Could Be Yours, was one of the National Post's top ten poetry books of 2010.