Bolaño's own preferred literary persona was as a poet. When asked, "What makes you believe you're a better poet than a novelist?" Bolaño replied, "The poetry makes me blush less."

Tres, his most inventive and bracing poetry collection, is a showcase of the author's ability and willingness to freely cross genres, with poems written in prose, stories in verse, and flashes of writing that can hardly be categorized.

As the title implies, the collection is composed of three sections. "Prose from Autumn in Gerona," a cinematic series of prose poems, slowly reveals a subtle and emotional tale of unrequited love by presenting each scene, shattering it, and piecing it all back together, over and over again. The second part, "The Neochileans," is a sort of On the Road in verse that narrates the travels of a young Chilean band on tour in the far reaches of their country. Finally, a series of short poems takes us on "A Stroll Through Literature" and reminds us of Bolaño's masterful ability to walk the line between the comically serious and the seriously comical.