The recent proliferation of what are commonly called “hybrid” literary forms has given rise to a proliferation of descriptive terms. Taking my poetry practice as a base, and the term “poetic essay” as a guiding prescription for the process, this project set out to discover what textual and thematic structures would evolve from an exploration of representations and discourses of love, using an organic method, i.e., attempting to enact both experience and knowledge-process in the forms of the work. Descriptive terms were bypassed, leaving the field open to discovering one. My research involved constructing a “matrix” of discourses and representations of love: 1. influential literary texts from Ovid’s Ars Amatoria onwards; 2. an eclectic range of material representing literary, scientific, psychological, cultural and popular perspectives. To interact with these, I compiled a written record of autobiographical experience, which became the voice of a wandering “Querent” who arrives in this echoic environment—conceived allegorically as the apartment complex in which I live. There are six essays or “apartments,” each addressing specific motifs through poems, critical treatments and ruminations. Following each is a poem of primary or proprioceptive awareness, an interstice. I now propose a new term—“autopoetic essay”—for the process of attempting to create a text that imitates a living system, exemplified in Among Love’s Apartments. In a seventh, critical, essay I detail how the term finds an analogy in the Maturana-Varela biological theory of “autopoiesis.” I suggest how features of this theory might be applied to my method and to the methodology in certain essayistic texts, specifically some of Anne Carson, Susan Griffin, Maggie Nelson and Kathy Acker. Apart from the biological analogy, “autopoetic essay” has the virtue of incorporating the components “auto” (of the self, automatic, autonomous), “poetic” (of poetry as a discipline), and“essay” (open-form critical life-writing).