"Loser Bitch" by Sister Yang
A zine from the P-town scene
Loser Bitch by Ash Yang-Thompson. Zine, 2025
The cover of issue 4 of Loser Bitch features a nun in sunglasses picking penises out of a tree. “Based on a 14th century manuscript,” reads the caption. The image is surprising and dirty and humorously sublime, which serves as a good descriptor for Loser Bitch itself. What is Loser Bitch? Who is a loser bitch? I’m not sure about the who exactly, but the what, after browsing the first four issues of the Portland, OR-based zine (“The official publication of the Portland metro area and the only official source of real and fake news in the world,” declares issue 2), I can confidently say that Loser Bitch is a lot of things, by which I mean, whatever the fuck it wants to be. And what it seems to want to be, up to this point, isn’t shock-mag or news lampoon or sport stats or buying guide but instead a sort of prolonged artist’s statement, a maybe-manisto in zine form, wherein we watch the artist attempt to come to grips with artistic deviance while considering the big question: How to Live? A very Montaigne-esque endeavor, but from the perspective of a young, female, Asian-American, on-the-spectrum, queer (?), artist-poet-writer (honestly, I can’t claim to know exactly how Yang-Thompsom identifies—feel free to ask! via ashley.yang.thompson@gmail.com). Sister Yang, the zine’s authorial persona, makes plain her mission in issue 1, stating, “This is my most cherished desire: an art that is unsanitized, hopelessly flawed, the stuff that isn’t edited out, or condensed, but repetitive, horror vacuu (?), without resolution or conclusion —ALIVE.” Or, as said elsewhere, “I had to make Loser Bitch to defend what is really important to me.
Hell yeah.
In short, Loser Bitch is neither for losers nor for bitches, but manifests as a rather earnest vessel for any artist seeking the MUST for why they should continue creating. Issue 3 gives good food for thought in the form of words from Karl Ove Knausgaard: “I write because I am going to die. I paint because I have lost faith in the world.”
I’m not sure where you can find Loser Bitch outside of Portland. Email Sister Yang and request a few issues; they might just show up in your mailbox as they did mine and remind you what a joy it is to receive actual physical mail that’s not junk or bill or solicitation.
In the meantime, check out Ash Yang-Thompson’s books, which you can get from Bateau Press, and give the artist a follow on IG, @leaky_rat.
